Final club initiations, like falling leaves or Undergraduate Council election fliers, are one of the harbingers of winter at Harvard.

Initiations offer the closest thing to street theater on campus. One group of punches this year sported boxing gloves and imitated Rocky in front of Widener Library. Another club's initiates played an informal basketball game in front of the Science Center.

"I saw two guys acting out Romeo and Juliet on the steps of Widener, and I saw guys carrying cumbersome stuffed animals around," says Melissa A. Tanner '03.

Sometimes it is a theater of the absurd.

"I saw a bunch of naked people running up Mt. Auburn [Street] last week," says D. Andy Rice '01. "They became part of the landscape."

Initiation season is easily the most visible time of year for final clubs, institutions that College administrators have long condemned for violating anti-discrimination policies. Since they are not official student groups, the clubs are prohibited from collecting University funds, from postering on campus, from recruiting at the Activities Fair.

But public initiations of new members take place in front of the Science Center or in Harvard Yard, locations where administrators cannot help but notice their activities.

Even HUPD Chief Francis D. "Bud" Riley says he observed men wearing dresses while carrying snow shovels "long before the snowstorm."