This is my recurring series on people I've known from my childhood who have recently achieved fame in some way (or are trying to achieve it, anyway).

LUO HONGMEI, a.k.a. ALY ROSE

Okay, maybe she's a relative unknown here in the United States. But as the old cliche goes, she's "big in China".

She's also into China big time - the culture, the culinary fare, the history, everything. Which was very surprising to me... the years I've known her in school, I never would have guessed her affinity for things Chinese. Then again, I might have seen her sporting Oriental garb for some class project, so I guess it wasn't really all that surprising.

Still, I never figured this redheaded girl I knew from Ms. Howard's piano class, who shared a geometry class with me when I was a sophomore, would suddenly pack up her stuff, change her name to Luo Hongmei ("hongmei" = "red rose" in Chinese) and move to the Far East to study Chinese dance at one of Beijing's most prestigious performing arts schools, the Beijing Dance Academy.

In one of my Google searches on old classmates, I found this article on her... sure enough, she was from Texas and the photograph confirmed it for me that this was the same Alyssa from high school. But this wasn't on any old website... this was on a Chinese magazine-type site. She took her first trip to China in 1994, and loved it so much she decided to pursue a degree in Choreography at the Academy. This article was published in 2001, so by now she probably has the degree in hand, and has landed a job somewhere in the land of Zhongguo, as she said she would. More web searching led to another later article where Aly... er, Hongmei was mentioned as a member of a dance company, so that's probably what she's up to now.

Well, best wishes to her... and I hope her dance troupe stops in Dallas one of these days as part of a tour.