It’s time to go home for winter break this year, and a bus full of Harvard students bound for New York is wondering why one scruffy, energetic individual keeps jaunting up and down the aisle while a friend videotapes him.

He keeps his eyes on the camera, brow slightly furrowed, his entire goateed face animated as he dives into an investigatory spiel about the integrity of the Harvard shuttle bus service.

“It’s uncertain whether the so-called miracle solution to Harvard’s transportation problem is really a solution at all,” he says in a stoic reporter’s voice. “Just take a look at these cramped quarters, where two people must sit next to each other, side-by-side.”

In fact, he contends, it is not a service at all, but a money-making scheme thrown together by the Undergraduate Council.

Of course, most of the people on the bus seem to figure out what’s going on pretty quickly—they know that B.J. Averell ’02-’03 is up to his old tricks.

Whether he’s pulling a prank, leading his own variety show, running for Undergraduate Council president or just running naked through the Yard during Primal Scream, B.J. is a one-man circus, an unstoppable improviser, a consummate performer.

To Harvard students, though, that description may be unnecessary; it seems like everyone already knows B.J.

A Traveling Circus

His shuttle bus escapades—part of an unfinished documentary project B.J. has been working on about Harvard life—are not the first time he has raised eyebrows among his fellow travelers.

He was catapulted to fame at Harvard his sophomore year after being arrested at Logan Airport trying to sneak onto a plane home for Thanksgiving in 1999.

Since his seat on the last remaining flight home had been given away, he wiggled past security and took the one remaining seat on the plane—in the bathroom.

His “brilliant” scheme didn’t work out as he’d hoped. B.J. ended up kneeling on the runway, handcuffed, in the care of a group of unsmiling police officers.

Before his airport stunt made him a campus legend, B.J. had already experimented widely to find his place on campus.

During his first year, he joined the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus and the lightweight crew team, captained his dorm’s intramural teams, performed magic shows for nursing home residents and acted in three shows.

But it was only after bungling his tryouts for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and the improv troupe On Thin Ice (OTI), however, that B.J. began to realize his true calling at Harvard as a performer.