People

By Guy D. Garcia

By the time she packed up for the final time last week and flew back to Moscow, Katerina Lycheva, 11, was so gorged on Americana that even a child of capitalism might have had a tummyache. On her fifth and final stop in Los Angeles, Katya made forays to Disneyland and Universal Studios, where , respectively she collected the standard Mouseketeer ears and mugged for the camera in the huge paw and maw of King Kong. At one point Katya seemed to have gone Hollywood, donning a pair of sunglasses and telling students, "I want to be a film director." In fact, she is already a somewhat experienced actress, having appeared back home in five peace-promoting films. Earlier, in Houston, she visited the Johnson Space Center and participated in her first Easter-egg hunt. In Chicago she sampled the cuisine of McDonald's (French fries da, Big Mac nyet). And in Washington she toured the national monuments. The point of her 13-day visit was to bring a message of world peace to U.S. children and adults alike, so Katya was more than happy when during her White House tour she happened to bump into the nation's top grownup on his way to work in the Oval Office. "Our children, children anywhere, cannot live happily while there are nuclear weapons on earth," she told the Commander in Chief, who said that ending the threat of nuclear war would make him happy too. Nevertheless, TASS later complained that the meeting had been orchestrated "in such a way as to make it appear that the President ran into the eleven-year-old girl by chance." Seemingly, Moscow's decision to send Katya on the peace mission did not much dampen even the war of words and innuendo.