ZEPHYRHILLS - For a moment, you got the sense that J.J. Jivan, valedictorian, wouldn't be able to do it. He had worked so hard to earn the privilege of giving this speech, and now that the moment had arrived and he was standing before a standing-room-only crowd, the words wouldn't come.
"Whew," he said.
"You can do it!" yelled a fellow graduate.
Something must have stirred J.J. He came on strong.
"We came, we saw and we conquered!" he said, his voice rising in a crescendo.
Zephyrhills High School graduated 267 bright-eyed seniors Friday night in a 90-minute ceremony filled with celebration and promise, flashbulbs and teenage stunts.
There was not an empty seat in the school's gymnasium as proud relatives and friends scrunched together to make room for the overflowing crowd. Even the rafters were packed with standing well-wishers - 15 minutes before principal Jim Davis took the stage to kick off what turned into a sometimes reflective, sometimes raucous ceremony.
The ceremony was interrupted about 8:30 p.m. when a woman walked to the stage as a school administrator was speaking to the graduating class.
Police identified the woman as Deborah Louise Mosley, 37, and said she stepped to the microphone and told the audience that her son had not been allowed to participate in the ceremony.
Mosley, who appeared angry, was arrested by a Zephyrhills police officer as she walked off the stage. She told police: "I wanted recognition for my son," according to an arrest report.
Mosley was arrested on a charge of disrupting a school function and was held in the Land O'Lakes jail Saturday on $250 bail.
The night offered plenty of speeches, music and tassle-turning, as well as the usual garden-variety graduation stunts: the volleying of an elusive beach ball, air horns blaring, cow bells ringing (this is Zephyrhills, after all), and one boy's celebratory dance across the stage with diploma fresh in hand.
Class president Taleesha Powell asked her fellow graduates to turn to their left, then their right. Good-byes, she said, are not easy in a small town where so many friendships begin in first grade, if not before.
But if the past is any indication, she said, the future holds great things for the Class of 2003.
