She may not have hit Leno or Letterman yet, but Avery W. Gardiner '97 is already fodder for political humor.

"At the Kennedy School annual dinner, they usually have some speakers and do some funny skits," says John W. Turner '97. "This last year one of the students [played] Avery Gardiner."

At nearly every event at the Institute of Politics (IOP) Forum last year, Gardiner was the first person at the microphone to ask questions after the speaker's remarks. And every single time she said exactly the same thing:

"I'm Avery Gardiner, a senior at the College and chair of the Institute of Politics Student Advisory Committee. On behalf of the Institute of Politics, I'd like to welcome you to Harvard."

"She does it so well and so often that all the Kennedy School students know her," says Turner, who worked with Gardiner as the Student Advisory Committee vice-chair. "Anyone at the IOP knows [that] line."

There seems to be no question in the mind of those who know her that Gardiner will someday become a topic of late-night talk show monologues.

"We all expect that Avery [will] end up in Congress or the White House," says Sally Foster, Gardiner's American history teacher and year-book adviser at Cony High School in Augusta, Maine.

Gardiner's parents introduced her to politics early and often. When the family moved to Augusta when Gardiner was three, they lived just behind the state capitol complex.

The family's dinner table conversations often revolved around politics and other community issues.

On her most recent visit to Augusta, "she wasn't home for five minutes when we'd gotten into a discussion about politics," says Gardiner's mother Anne, a court mediator.

At an age when other kids were going to the playground, Gardiner and her siblings spent Maine's harsh winters learning about state government.

"If the legislature was in session, we'd sit up in the balcony. It allowed me to be stimulated by the current events," Anne says. "[The children] were really good and were fascinated."

Gardiner got her picture in the local paper for the very first time at age three when she accompanied her dad, Robert H. Gardiner '66, to the state's Democratic caucus.

"She was definitely the youngest one there," remembers her father, who is president of Maine public television. "There was a look on her face that showed interest in what was going on."

At age nine, Gardiner was already planning a career of her own in government.

"I just sort of out of the blue said, 'Avery, what do you think you want to be in life?'" says her father. "She says, 'Well, Dad, I used to think I wanted to be president. But now I think I want to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.' It was an outrageous age to even be thinking about that."