Alan Peppard

From the Six Degrees of Separation file: Dallas-raised actors Andrew, Owen and Luke Wilson are second cousins of New Yorker writer Ben McGrath. (Their fathers, Dallas author Robert A. Wilson and former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath, are first cousins.)

Last month in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" column, Ben took a hilarious look at the A-Rod-Madonna situation by consulting Yale literature professor Harold Bloom, who is writing a book about Kabbalah. And it's not "that ghastly sort of adulterated popular Kabbalah," followed by Madonna, according to Professor Bloom.

An expert on Kabbalah, Professor Bloom also has a firm grasp of baseball.

"The great Alex Rodriguez, the famous A-Rod, is not a clutch performer," he says. "He compiles these enormous statistics, but every time I make the mistake of looking at a game, he comes up with two out and men on second and third, and does nothing."

Could it be that A-Rod reads The New Yorker? When he hit Dallas last week to play his former team, the Rangers, his focus was not on Her Madgesty, but on hitting.

A-Rod did not stay with the Yankees, but checked into the Rock Star Suite at Hotel ZaZa.

In a quiet spot outside the hotel, he was seen discreetly working on the basics. While a trainer pitched sugar packets at him, A-Rod took practice swings with a broom handle.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declined the chance to take cheap shots at the president during a phoner last week on the Gene & Julie Mornings show on 103.7 Lite FM to promote her book, Know Your Power.

Gene and Julie asked the Speaker how Dallasites will like having W. as a neighbor once he leaves office.

"He's a lovely person, and I think he'll be a wonderful neighbor in Dallas," she said. "We have to make a distinction between policy politics and personal. He is a lovely man, and Laura Bush is as lovely a person as there is."

She did manage one dig. "I think he'll be a much better neighbor than he is president."

The great depth of the late Patsy and Raymond Nasher's art collection means that the Nasher Sculpture Center can regularly display works that the public has never seen.

A few will be brought out next month for the exhibition In Pursuit of the Masters, celebrating the center's fifth anniversary.

The show will feature the rarely seen Jean Arp sculpture, Torso With Buds, the first contemporary sculpture the couple acquired. A gift from Mrs. Nasher for Mr. Nasher's 46th birthday, it remained in their Dallas home because of its personal significance.

"Applause is an addiction, like heroin or checking your e-mail." Sideshow Mel on The Simpsons