Alan Peppard

When Mayor Tom Leppert spoke Wednesday at the venerable Oak Cliff Lion's Club, he was asked to pull out the winning name for the traditional prize drawing.

(Tickets are sold for $1, and the pot is split 50-50 between the winner and the club.) The big winner of all those $1 bills?

Ed Oakley, who lost last year's runoff for the mayor's office to Mr. Leppert in the most expensive mayoral election in Dallas history.

So Eliot Spitzer had a call-girl rendezvous in Dallas in the last eight months? That was the word in Wednesday's New York Times.

Hmmm? New York, Washington, Dallas? He's been traveling the same route as the J.M.W. Turner retrospective, which opened in Washington and is now at the Dallas Museum of Art and will go to New York later this year.

Don't know how that all fits together, but it was worth a mention.

How did Charles Barkley pick up the nickname the Round Mound of Rebound? The man lives well.

This week, the former NBA star was in Dallas for the Guaranty Bank SMU Athletic Forum. Wednesday night, he wined and dined at Nick & Sam's steakhouse.

One presumes that model Lauren Bush will be in Crawford on May 10 for the wedding of her first cousin Jenna Bush to Henry Hager . Lauren is the glamorous Elite model and daughter of the president's brother, Neil Bush, and Sharon Bush, Neil's ex-wife. She has appeared on the cover of Vogue and Vanity Fair .

"It's going to be a beautiful day," Lauren says in People magazine about the wedding. "I don't know yet," she replied when asked if she's a bridesmaid, then added: "All of our cousins are close."

Lauren Bush went to high school at Kincaid in Houston then on to Princeton. She currently dates designer Ralph Lauren's son, David, which raises the question: If they get married, will she be Lauren Lauren?

And while we're on the topic: Last month, Shanghai-born billionaire Gerald Tsai sued the aforementioned Sharon Bush to return the 11-carat canary diamond ring he gave her in 2006. Their engagement was called off in January. His suit in Manhattan says that he bought the ring at Saks for $243,000, but now its replacement value is $434,000.

The New York gossip press lapped up the response filed by her lawyer, Raoul Felder, who told my pal George Rush at the New York Daily News that he wanted to depose the billionaire about "his drinking, which could impair his memory and affect his credibility."

The boss of Barneys is always watching the competition. Barneys chairman and CEO Howard Socol was down from New York this week checking in on his NorthPark store when I spotted him taking a turn through the NorthPark Neiman Marcus.

Film producer and former Dallasite William "Bill" Jarblum will be back in town to show his film Little Traitor, starring Alfred Molina, at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival. Little Traitor is set in Palestine in 1947 on the eve of the creation of Israel.

Bill, who is married to former Dallas beauty Loraine Bassett, used to be co-owner and president of Texon Entertainment. When he sold out of Texon, he held on to his piece of the company's current hit comedy Charlie Bartlett