Not sure how many of you grew up watching Nickelodeon’s cable series called ”The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo” but the actress that played Shelby Woo (Irene Ng)
just got married this past weekend on Shelter Island. Irene and I go
way back. We knew each other since we were nine years old which was ten
years ago…. not! Anyway, I was invited to her wedding and was
probably the first one to rsvp. Irene also asked me to give a speech
and a toast at her wedding and I thought she was just teasing me. See,
people around me usually ask me to shut the eff up. No one trusts me
enough to let me speak at their weddings. This says a lot about
Irene. 

A few facts about this fabulous childhood friend of mine. At the age
of 16, Irene was discovered by TV talent agents while competing for the
title of Miss Allentown, Pennsylvania (she did win the title). Since
then she has starred in several movies and TV shows including the sob
fest “Joy Luck Club” and Oliver Stone’s “Heaven & Earth”. Her
biggest break came when she was cast in the title role of the cable
series ”The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo”. She was also the first Asian-American actress to grace the cover of TV Guide (TV_Guide_Cover.jpg), and that was at least ten years ago. My girl did us proud!

Being a typical overachieving Asian, Irene graduated from Harvard with
a degree in Pre-Med and Economics. She was always the smart one in our
class. After she quit acting, she went into banking for a few years and
she stopped doing that a year ago. Now she is just happily married to
her man (David Rosa) and cannot wait to move to the burbs and pop out a
dozen kids. I already told her that I loved her but not so much that I
would babysit for her.

Here’s an old clip from “The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo”. She will
probably kill me for showing you this but I don’t care. Good things are
meant to be shared.