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    In his senior year at Edgewood High School, Jim Inman Jr. was performing at Disney World with the Music Warehouse, a show choir featuring the school's best singers and dancers.
     He and his dance partner, Jayna Bechtel, were in the front row, mesmerizing the crowd with a whiling dervish dance number, when Bechtel's dress strap snapped like a twig in a tornado.
     "Jayna just held her dress up with one hand and completed the number," Inman recalled. "But later, when we watched the video, we saw this indescribable look of horror on her face."
     That is just one of the memories that brings a smile to Inman's face when he reflects on his 3 1/2 years of involvement with the Music Warehouse before graduatiing in 1994.
     He also remembers how the Music Warehouse drew together tighter than rope fibers when one of its members was killed in a car accident.
     "It may sound kind of corny, but her death was the entire group's loss," he said. "We felt it like a family."
     That kind of closeness is one of the reasons Inman decided to help put together a celebration of the group's 25th anniversary with an alumni concert May 26 at the Indiana University Auditorium.
     Inman hopes close to half of the 400 alumni from across the country will attend, where they can reminisce and perfrom some numbers from years gone by.
     The event will be open to the public. Times and ticket prices have yet to be established.
     "alumni who haven't been contacted are encourages to give me a call at (812) 876-9576," said Inman.
     Music Warehouse alumni say part of the reason they're eager to participate in the 25-year celebration is to honor the group's founder and director, Verda Slinkard.
     "I was a senior at Edgewood in 1975 when Verda was first hired by the school as the choir teacher," said Lynn Reed, now the superintendent of Brown County Schools. "She was not much older than we were, and she was vivacious and fun and easy to talk with."
     Inman says Slinkard had an infectious enthusiasm.
     "She put into all of us a drive to succeed," he said. "She would say it's not about winning trophiesl it's about pushing yourself to reach your goals."
     Slinkard, now in her 25th year of directing Music Warehouse, still has a way of connecting with students.
     A week before graduating from Edgewood last year, Michelle Smith wrote a letter to Slinkard, thanking her for the impact she'd had on her life.
     "Verda, you're very special to me and always will be," she writes. "I'll miss you. I'll miss you like I'll miss my own mother."
     Inman says he was impressed with Slinkard's compassion for the 100 or so students who auditioned each year for the Music Warehouse but failed to make the 40-member choir.
     "She'd take them aside, one by one, and talk to them like a mother talks to her child," he said. "She'd say, 'This is what you need to work on, and if you do, you'll have a better shot of making the choir next year.' "
     Reed recalls Slinkard opening her home to many students, helping them with homework or personal problems.
     "She had a special quality that made you want to be around her," she said. "She was unquestionably your teacher, but she was also your friend."

    Music Warehouse alums from the early years say she had a knack for selling people on her idea of creating a first-rate show choir.
     "She said, 'This is what everyone else is doing, and this is how we're going to do it better,' " said Reed.
     Do it better they did. During the past quarter century, the Music Warehouse has garnered dozens of awards at national and international competitions.
     And Slinkard says their success has actually irked the larger high schools, some of which had six or seven times more students.
     After the Music Warehouse finished second at a national competition in Fort Wayne in 1980, Slinkard recalls being accosted by the principal of a high school boasting 4,000 students.
     "He came up to me in the hallway and said, 'There's no way your show choir comes from a school of 750 students,' " she said. "I told him it was true and that we didn't even have a choir room. Later, he drove to Edgewood and asked our principal if I was telling the truth."
     By the 1990s, the Music Warehouse was making three to four out-of-state trips a year for national and international competitions -- in places like Chicago, Orlando and Los Angeles.
     Inman's facorite trek was to Boston, a two-day, 24-hour trip made in Star of Indiana busses.
     "The trip went really fast because we were having so much fun," he said. "We'd be up till 2 a.m. talking and playing euchere."
     A third of the way into the journey, one of the girls discovered she'd forgotten her $350 sequined dress in Ellettsville.
     "They stopped the bus so she could phone her parents and ask them to Fed-Ex it," she said. "It arrived just a few hours before the performance.
     Music Warehouse alums say practicing, performing and traveling together fostered tightly knit friendships.
     "What I liked the most were the friendships," said Trina Chandler, a member of Music Warehouse for three years in the mid-80's. "I still keep in touch with several of the friends I made through Music Warehouse."
     While traversing the country in search of competition, Music Warehouse members did not always behave like angels.
     "Once some guys on the third floor of a hotel tied some bedsheets together into a rope and climbed down to the second floor where the girls were," Inman said.
     Many of those who spent a few years under Slinkard's exacting tutelage say she gave them their first intoxicating whiff on the stage.
     "Her first year at Edgewood we did the Lil' Abner musical for the community," said Reed. "It was my first experience with that kind of thing and I loved it."
     Slinkard says she feels proud that 20 Music Warehouse members have gone on to become music majors in college, and six are music teachers in the area.
     "I look at the Music Warehouse like I would a child," said Slinkard. "I gave birth to it and have seen it grow and mature over the years. And now it has two siblings -- the Sophisticated Ladies, an all-girls' show choir; and New Edition, a beginning show choir."
     Slinkard is starting to see Music Warehouse grandchildren, students whose parents were members of the group 25 years ago.
     "The Music Warehouse has been like an extended family to me over the years," she said.