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In case you missed it, the Washington Blade has a nice piece on gays running against gays in the hot, hot, hot ANC races. (Note: Our candidate, Arthur Delaney, is not gay. If he was, he probably would have clean pants ready to go.)

Among the gay races, we’re keeping a close eye on ANC 2B09 in Dupont Circle. Chairman Ramon Estrada, who’s served for six years, is facing a challenge from Doug A. Rogers. News we broke about the planned development at 14th and T is shaping up as the issue that divides. Rogers is a big backer of the Diner/Tryst/Comedy option at the former Church of the Reformer, where Minneapolis-based furniture chain Room & Board is looking to open. Estrada, although not openly against the local-biz project led by restaurateur Constantine Stavropoulos, is also not carrying the project’s water, mainly because of the disturbance a 24-hour Diner hybrid could create. We could not confirm that. Estrada has never returned our calls.

Rogers did and will be checking in with us as his race unfolds.

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I just stopped by Marie H. Reed, 2200 Champlain St. NW. A friend told me she waited a little over 30 minutes for her boyfriend to cast his vote there.

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Washington City Paper is breaking all sorts of longstanding traditions to endorse Arthur Delaney for Advisory Neighborhood Commission seat 6B08.

City Paper has never endorsed candidates as an institution, typically leaving that job to crack political reporter Loose Lips. And Loose Lips has never endorsed candidates in advisory neighborhood commission races, considering those pissant offices well below his pay grade.

But just as the Chicago Tribune threw away decades of pro-Republican tradition to endorse Barack Obama this year, City Paper is forced to reexamine its course by the prospect of having a community advocate as talented, as focused, as driven as Arthur Delaney serve the residents of east Capitol Hill. Not endorsing Mr. Delaney would be an unforgivable error of historic proportions.

Mr. Delaney’s singular focus on single-beer sales reflects a preternatural political talent, one that can bring the people of 6B08 together under one principal: Can’t we all just have a beer?

Don’t get us wrong: Mr. Delaney isn’t just a one-beer man. He’s been seen enjoying multiple beers from time to time, on the concrete pad in front of his apartment, as well as at local watering holes such as Tune Inn, Trusty’s, Tune Inn, Capitol Lounge, and Tune Inn.

But Mr. Delaney is a singles man at heart. Like all the residents of 6B08, he is a hard worker—we at Washington City Paper can absolutely testify to his devotion as a freelance journalist (to wit, his willingness to pursue this assignment)—and he deserves to buy a single beer for his refreshment after a long day’s toil, as do we all.

So we must join Mr. Delaney in his cri de coeur: Sometimes, you just want one!

—The Editors

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Arlene Reba, 74, stood outside Nest, a new consignment shop on Wisconsin Avenue NW in Tenleytown, and peered in. The place was closed, but Reba caught a glimpse of an employee inside the store. The employee ducked out of sight and waited for Reba to leave.

Reba, it turns out, had a history with the people running Nest. The man behind Nest is John Coon, an entrepreneur who specializes in opening and closing consignment shops. Coon ran the recently shuttered Washington Consignment in Cleveland Park and operated another store by the same name on Wisconsin Avenue before closing it more than a year ago. Another Coon consignment store on Nicholson Lane in Rockville closed in August.

Per his travels in the second-hand-sales biz, Coon has attracted a coterie of regulars, with Reba among them. At Washington Consignment in Cleveland Park, Reba was “a friend of the store,� according to Coon. But the two have had a falling-out since Washington Consignment began going under. Reba lost trust in the store, where she knew all of the employees and had done business for several years. Others who claim they should have been paid and weren’t or were paid too little too late echo her concerns.

The Cleveland Park store closed Sept. 28. “We went insolvent,� says Coon, who sometimes lists himself as the store owner but is in actuality the president of a board of a directors of a company that owns the store, he says.

“It was a victim of the economy,� says Coon of his latest closed store. He needed out of an expensive Connecticut Avenue lease, and when he realized he was not taking in enough money to cover expenses—including paying his consigners—he decided to have a big sale, close up shop, and sell the store’s Web site and e-mail list to a new corporation, which owns Nest.

At Nest, he has combined all of his endeavors, making it one-stop shopping for cleaning services, painting, interior design, home-staging, and event- and wedding-planning. He turned an old rug store that, he says, “everyone told me had been going out of business for 20 years� into a brightly colored gallery of other people’s furnishings, complete with a parrot named Pedro.

The sale of the Web site and the proceeds from the new store are helping him to pay his old consigners, he says. But some of his old consigners feel they are getting a bad deal. Among those who’ve come forward, Reba was owed the most.

Reba, a retired teacher and travel broker who finds items at estate sales and the like and then consigns them, was offered store credit in lieu of a check from Washington Consignment for more than $2,000. She took it, she says, “because I figured if they closed, I would have nothing.� She picked out a 1920s-era Chinese emperor’s robe, a Japanese wedding coat, and a few small statues. “All of it had to be carried out,� she says.

Reba felt her account had not been zeroed-out; Coon says it was and then some. When Reba went in again a few days later, she spied a bronze panther someone had recently brought in. “I loved it,� she says of the small sculpture by artist Loet Vanderveen. She owned another work of his, a bishop sitting in a rocking chair, “and I had never seen another piece by him� before the panther showed up.

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Sweet pics of Hizzoner from the High Heel Race, courtesy of Joe Tresh at washingtonphotojournal.com.

Via the Cleveland Park message board, a Porter Street resident warns:

“During the past several years, vehicles belonging to my wife and I were vandalized while parked behind our Porter Street house, on either Quebec Place or Rowland Place. On Halloween Eve in 2006, my wife’s car was egged pretty well…

And in 2007, my motorcycle got more of the same (despite being covered), damaging the paint and cracking the windshield (and resulting in a faint “burned omelet” smell when I rode it, no
matter how hard I cleaned it). Both times, it happened behind our house on Quebec Place — but if memory serves, others reported similar incidents elsewhere as well.

So this year, I’m parking elsewhere — downtown if need be. Just thought I’d remind folks in Cleveland Park that we do have a history of this taking place, and that you may want to take similar precautions on Friday night.”