That’s Donna at right in front. Alex is in the stroller in the background immediately behind Mr. Smee. No one knows better than Alex and Donna Voutsinas that it’s a small world after all.
Thirty years ago, when they lived in separate countries long before they met and married, a family shot of little Donna at Walt Disney World captured Alex in a stroller in the background.
“It just blew our minds when we realized,” Alex Voutsinas, a 32-year-old transplanted Montrealer told the Star Thursday from south Florida.
“I got chills. It was just too much of a coincidence. It was fate.”
That fateful realization came just one week before their wedding eight years ago. Alex and Donna had been going through old family snapshots. There, in the blurry background of a picture of 5-year-old Donna was 3-year-old Alex being pushed down Main Street at the same moment in 1980 by his father. The senior Voutsinas’s distinctive jet-black hair with its white tuft caught his eye.
“My mother pulled out albums from the same trip. My dad is wearing exactly the same outfit.”
Other pictures from that trip showed Alex on his dad’s shoulders. The boy in the background of Donna’s picture and the boy in those pictures were the same.
A blow-up of the famous frame hangs on their living room wall in Boynton Beach, Fla., but Alex’s mother keeps the original in a safe.
“It’s like gold to her.”
It wasn’t until the couple joined Facebook recently and posted the picture that the world got wind of the staggering twist of fate with which they’d entertained family and friends for years.
Alex, who is a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen, and his family of hoteliers had moved to Florida when he was 10.
He and Donna met 15 years ago when they worked at the same hotel in Boca Raton shortly after she’d moved south from Long Island, N.Y. They dated for six years, married and had three sons, who they take to Disney World regularly.
