Alan Peppard

For Texas oil giant Cary Maguire, his birthday conundrum has always been how to use the breathtaking backyard of his Dallas estate for a party and still keep his guests comfortable in the late-May heat.

He and his wife, Ann, arrived at an elegant solution for his 80th-birthday extravaganza Saturday night. Like something out of The Age of Innocence, the Maguires built an air-conditioned glass pavilion that extended from their Park Lane mansion and covered almost their entire backyard.

Guests wandered the grounds without leaving the enclosure and never feeling warmer than 72 degrees.

Wait. They covered and air-conditioned the entire backyard – even the Olympic-size pool and its surroundings?

In a word: Yup.

To complete the transparency theme, a Plexiglas bridge spanned the pool where belly dancers billed as "Cary's Harem" performed for the crowd.

The guest list was a Mount Rushmore of Texas greats. Ross Perot and his wife, Margot, were on hand, still aglow from Friday's announcement that their five children gave $50 million to the Museum of Nature and Science in their honor. Ross' best pal, Norman Brinker, came with his wife, Toni. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and her husband, Ray, enjoyed the festivities, as did 97-year-old oil titan Frank Pitts; hotelier Caroline Rose Hunt; civic leader Ruth Altshuler and her husband, Ken; Southern Methodist University president Gerald Turner and his wife, Gail; oilman Bill Moss and his wife, Dianne; banker Ted Strauss and his wife, Sue; Ted's daughter Janie McGarr and her husband, Cappy; and Fort Worth power lawyer Dee Kelly.

And no Maguire party would be complete without oilman Ed Cox. Cary and Ed are not just friends, they are also enshrined together in perpetuity at SMU. The university's Cary M. Maguire Building sits smack in the middle of SMU's Edwin L. Cox School of Business.

Thursday, actress Fran Drescher's unmistakable voice could be heard in the dining room at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek.

The star of the sitcom The Nanny was in town to address health-care professionals attending Friday's 2008 International MUSE Conference at the Gaylord Texan. She wrote a book called Cancer Schmancer about her cancer battle, and also created the Cancer Schmancer Foundation.

In the new Entertainment Weekly, David Sedaris reports that controversies over exaggerations by writers such as James Frey led him to place the word "realish" on the copyright page of his new book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, to be released Tuesday. He says the word "realish" got him out of his usual prerelease conference with his publisher's lawyers.

"You say -ish, you don't have to meet with anyone," he tells the magazine. "If I'd known that, God! I'd have done it years ago!"

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