This is a review of Shep's Princeton University show on June 7th Jean Shepherd is an archaeologist of the present, studying artifacts before they become heaps of rubble. He looks at a diner or a traffic circle - just two of his favorite cultural treasures - with the awe and wonder an Egyptologist might show for the Sphinx. With this ability to turn the seemingly mundane into the exotic, is it any wonder that he loves 20th-century America and, particularly, 20th-century New Jersey? Not at all, he says. "People say New Jersey is ugly," said Shepherd, humorist, screen writer, radio personality and champion of the Garden State. "Well, there is beauty in everything. You can't have beauty without ugliness. Of course, you can't deny that in an industrial state there will be a lot of ugliness. But it is the industry that makes a state prosper. "Besides, I think every industry has an undeniable type of barbaric beauty. Have you ever been in an automobile plant? It's really spectacular." A kind of latter-day Margaret Mead, he loves to observe the natives in New Jersey - motorists speeding down the turnpike, tourists photographing Lucy the Margate elephant, elderly women negotiating traffic circles in luxury automobiles that are longer than a William Faulkner sentence. "You know what I really like about New Jersey?" asked Shepherd, who maintains homes or apartments in Florida, Maine and New York. "It's filled chockablock with Jean Shepherd fans." Indeed. He met a lot of them Saturday night in Princeton, where he performed for the 21st consecutive year as part of the annual reunion activities on campus. Approximately 1,000 people heard him reminisce about his youth for more than two hours at the Richardson Auditorium. A burly man with a brown beard and a thick neck that looks as though it were bolted onto his shoulders, Shepherd resembled a genial beatnik during his performance. He told stories about his boyhood, his Army days and his love for New Jersey. And, as he did so, he gestured wildly, pacing the stage like a jail inmate waiting to hear from his lawyer. "As I drive along Route 1, I notice that nothing changes in Jersey," he told the audience. "Like the Jersey dinah. I love to go to the Brunswick Circle Diner. But the best time to go there is at 3 o'clock in the morning. That's when you see a couple of yuppies that finally got tired of brie. They order some fat, greasy, Vinnie-type hamburgers. Vinnie's in the back cooking them up." Before his appearance, Shepherd met with some of the students who staff WPRB-FM (103.3), the campus radio station that sponsored his concert. The humorist strolled through Princeton with the scholars, telling them he was so impressed with the university that he was going to buy it. "I have mucho dinero," he assured them. "Princeton is an institution of learning," he told the audience almost three hours later. "Higher learning. Why, Brooke Shields comes here. . . . Can you imagine dissecting a toad with Brooke Shields in Biology II?" Whenever the humorist says something clever, which is often, he knows it. Smug? Not a chance. During such moments, Shepherd looks like a baseball fan who has just bitten into a juicy hot dog at Fenway Park - content, delighted and reasonably certain that, if life gets any better, it is not by a very wide margin. "I've always felt sorry for people who are turned off by the world," he said in an interview before his performance. "We only go through it once, and if you go through everything bitching and moaning and carping, you miss the point. If you can't recognize the beauty in a state like New Jersey, I think you have a deficiency in the beauty gland in your body." Born in Chicago, Shepherd was reared in Hammond, Ind., a steel mill town near the Windy City. Shepherd worked in the mills as a teenager, a job that might have turned into a lifelong career had it not been for the Army. He enlisted during the Korean War when he was 17. "I was stationed at Fort Monmouth during the Korean War - for four, five, six months," he recalled before his concert. "That was my first time in Jersey. Was Jersey stimulating? You gotta remember, I was in the Army. The biggest stimulation in the Army was going out looking for women. "But this was a new world to me. I was not used to living in a place that had an ocean next to it. On the weekends, I'd go over to Asbury Park, stroll along the boardwalk." After almost four years in the Army, he said, he returned to the Hoosier State, where he earned a degree in psychology from Indiana University. He has also received three honorary degrees. The most recent, a doctorate of humanities and letters from New England College in Henniker, N.H., means the most to him, he said. "I'm a doctor now - if I choose to use that title," said Shepherd, who performs at universities throughout the country. "I probably won't use it, though. Of course, I'll have a beeper, and I'll get calls when I'm eating at restaurants. I'm a doctor in humanities and letters, so if there's a crisis in humanities, I'll get beeped." Since his university days, Shepherd has had enough jobs to fill the resumes of 10 men. He has been a sports-car racer, a Volkswagen salesman, a novelist, a screenwriter and, for almost 20 years beginning in the mid-1950s, the host of a radio program. The show was broadcast over WOR in New York City, WNAC in Boston and KFRC in San Francisco. On both coasts, his disembodied voice inspired the kind of warm feelings an affectionate uncle might foster, but Shepherd was also part poet, part philosopher and a bit of a con man. He reminisced about his childhood in Hammond - his love of Little Orphan Annie ("Who's that little chatterbox? The one with curly golden locks. Who do I see? It's Little Orphan Annie."), his passion for the Chicago White Sox, his desire to get, one fateful Christmas, an official Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle, also known as a BB gun. He seemed to be reliving his youth on the radio. "You know, it's a funny thing," Shepherd said, chuckling. "People believe all those stories were true. They weren't. I put them in a real-life setting in the past, but they were all fiction. None of my stuff was from memory. I'm a story-teller. I tell stories." But his radio program was not just about the past - fictional or otherwise. Shepherd was known to refer to New York as "this Sodom-by-the-sea, this fetid hole." Sometimes, he would preface his shows with stinging comments, such as, "Yes, you fatheads out there in the darkness, you losers in the Sargasso Sea of existence, take heart, because WOR, in its never-ending crusade of public service, is once again proud to bring you . . . The Jean Shepherd Program." "I have no desire to return to radio," Shepherd said. "I think one of the things that hurts a lot of people - although they do it inadvertently, without realizing it - is that they're obssessed with the past. Nothing is more gone than the past. If you don't dig today, you're not going to dig anything. You have to move on." For Shepherd, "moving on" has meant going from radio to film. He wrote the screenplay for the 1983 movie A Christmas Story, which was based on his novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. And he plans to fly to Hollywood this week, he said, to cement a deal for a movie about a teenager entering the Army in the 1950s. "I really can't say too much about it at this stage," he said. "But I'm hoping to get Matt Dillon in it." Despite his excitement about the movie, Shepherd seemed just as excited about returning to Princeton next year. "Performing is more than exhilarating," he said. "It's ecstatic. It's like taking everything you enjoy in life and multiplying it 10 times."