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Sept. 19, 1999
By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
It was a dog on a motorcycle that caught Kathryn Chandler's eyes.
The guy with the dog was Kyle Chandler, star of CBS' "Early Edition" (which is filmed in Chicago).
But back in 1993, there was no "Early Edition." And Kathryn hadn't seen Kyle in any of his other roles. All she knew was that any man giving a big dog a ride on his motorcycle was a little eccentric.
And she liked that.
"There's a place in Los Angeles called Dog Park," says Kathryn, 36. "I would take my little Jack Russell terrier there, and sometimes I'd run into Kyle and his dog. So we would kind of smile at each other and do the triple take, but we wouldn't really do anything about it.
"Then one day I was there on one side of the park with my dog, and he was on the other side with his dog. No one else was there. So I said to (my dog) Otis - who never does anything that I tell him - `Go over and jump on that guy.' And he did! He went over and just pounced on Kyle, who said, `Whoa, friendly dog you got here.'"
Adds Kyle, 34, "That dog was part of her dowry."
You're thinking they started dating there and then, right? Wrong. The two - who it turned out lived on the same street - didn't go out until six months later.
"I saw a moving van in front of his house, and I thought, `Ohmigod! It's never going to happen!'" she remembers. "So I took my dog and slowly strolled by his house. I said, `Hey, are you moving?' And he said his neighbors were."
Then he asked her out to a movie.
Which leads to the question: Why did it take so long for Kyle to ask Kathryn out? She is a former model with an outgoing personality.
"I had lots of other girls to ask out first," he teases.
"He's lying!" she says, laughing.
Married since 1996, the couple live in Chicago with their daughter, Sydney. Kathryn has resumed a screenwriting career, which she had put on hold to start their family. But she says she wants to write an independent film starring a certain shy guy who knows how to ride a mean motorcycle.
And by the way, Kathryn still has the ticket stub from "Scent of a Woman" - the movie they went to on their first date.
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