A Disney Ending for Crisscrossed Lovers

About three years ago, Chris Sanders started getting some very odd phone calls.

“People would call and say ‘I want to speak with Chris Sanders,’ and I would say, ‘This is Chris Sanders,’ and they would get really angry and hang up,” recalls Sanders, 30, a Disney Studios animator.

“It happened like three times a week. People would call and become infuriated because they had reached me and then wouldn’t talk to me.”

Across town, 32-year-old Kris Sanders, the then newly hired buyer for the Disney Store in Glendale, was getting some odd mail.

“Art and animation stuff,” she says. “I didn’t know why I was getting it.”

Finally, Chris Sanders saw a roster of new hires, accompanied by photos. He realized the mix-up and remembers thinking: “Hey, she’s cute.”

He contacted Kris Sanders and they kept in touch, forwarding each other’s calls and mail.

They finally met in February, 1991, after Chris Sanders’ production office was moved to the main lot in Burbank, just down the street from his namesake’s office.

“I knew he was at the studio, so I called and said, ‘Let’s meet,’ ” Kris says.

“I was totally nervous,” Chris recalls. “I was having a bad hair day.”

It was love at first sight. They dated for four months before moving in together in Valencia, and on Sept. 12 they will marry.

Friends find the same names a little frustrating, but have given Chris (Christopher) and Kris (Christina) the monikers “girl-Kris” and “boy-Chris,” or “big-Chris” and “little-Kris.”

“If you say Chris and aren’t looking at one of them, they’ll both say, ‘huh?’ ” says Jenny Weber, a longtime friend of Kris. “It gets really weird.”

Chris and Kris (whose birthdays are 12 days apart, and whose work phone numbers are only one digit apart) continue to have some mix-ups: Money from one’s account has been posted to the other’s by mistake, and their TRWs were run on top of each other when one was trying to buy a car.

But as odd as the situation might seem, Chris Sanders says people who find out he’s marrying Kris Sanders aren’t surprised:

“They roll their eyes and think, ‘It figures.’ I guess because in this business, people do some bizarre things.

“After all, it is Hollywood.”