In this week’s Show & Tell, I profile Jae Ellis (pictured) and Allen Bickoff, childhood friends who overcame broken engagements, college sexual dry spells, and crippling “nice guy syndrome” to become Reston’s resident romance experts. Ellis and Bickoff are co-founders of AskRomeo.com, a dating and relationship advice outfit that helps (so far, only heterosexual) men and (yes, sometimes even) women find dates through group seminars, private coaching sessions, and, in extreme cases, week-long sleepovers in the pair’s Reston apartment.

Though AskRomeo.com markets its services to both men and women, their advice tends toward the masculine–dragon-slaying, fire-fighting, Top Gun masculine. Indeed, 80 percent of AskRomeo’s one-on-one clients are men. “Being men, a lot of the stuff that we put together comes from a male perspective,” says Bickoff. “We were never women that needed help, so we don’t know what that transformation is like.”

Michael Karlan, whose social networking site Professionals In The City partners with AskRomeo.com to provide its relationship courses to local singles, agrees that AskRomeo.com “tends to be a more male-centered event.” But Bickoff says they’re working on it: Bickoff, Ellis, and their female instructors are currently conducting research for a female-specific curriculum.

A preview, after the jump:

(Photo by Darrow Montgomery)

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I did some more research on last week’s post on the death of karaoke at the Galaxy Hut. Begins with a little recap:

Arlington’s Galaxy Hut has killed karaoke. Owner Lary Hoffman says he pulled the plug last December after getting legal threats from “one of the agencies” that collect licensing fees for songwriters and composers.

Music copyright laws are effectively enforced by three licensing agencies, BMI, ASCAP and SESAC, which collect money from places that play music composed by the artists they represent. DJs, jukeboxes and karaoke machines all count as performances, giving songwriters a claim to royalties and the agencies a motive to collect. The agencies charge yearly fees based on a bar’s size, how often they play music and the kind of music they play (live, recorded or “enhanced recorded music,” like karaoke). The minimum fee for BMI, which claims to hold the licenses for half of the music played in the states, is $309. The maximum is more than $9,000. A BMI spokesman confirmed that the agency hires contractors to make anonymous rounds surveying which bars are in compliance. Songwriters get dibs on the pool of fee payments based on estimates of how often their songs get played. That arithmetic factors in radio plays, national tours and, to a small extent, karaoke performances.

Hoffman wouldn’t specify which agency came a-knocking, or just how much money they demanded. He did say the sum would eclipse any extra revenue he earns with the attraction of yodeling for a crowd of intoxicated strangers. Hoffman adds that he shelled out a hefty sum to pay back fees. Now, unless there’s a live band (and he says he books indie bands that don’t have licensing agreements), Thursday nights will feature the same entertainment as the rest of the week, tunes from an internet jukebox, which pays the fees automatically.

Bartenders— Abdul Kayoumy and Haile Berhane, formerly wetting whistles on U Street at Local 16, began managing Velvet Lounge “about a week ago,” says Kayoumy; the official sale of the venue is pending approval from the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration. “I’ve always had a dream of starting up my own rock ’n’ roll bar,” says Kayoumy. Once the bartender’s officially running the show, what are his plans for the space? “Basically, we’re going to keep Velvet Lounge the same as it is,” he says: same name, same style, same booker, and same sound system. But he notes that Velvet Lounge’s downstairs bathrooms will see a bit of a face-lift once the liquor license goes through. “It’s already a little bit cleaner down there,” he says.

Chris Connelly, who owned the club for just shy of a decade, sold the joint to free up time for surfing in Costa Rica, kayaking in Montana, and despair-free snow days in the District. “Now when it snows, I can celebrate,” says Connelly. “It doesn’t mean I’ll be losing hundreds of dollars.” Still, Connelly’s not ready to give up the bar business just yet; he says he’ll serve as an informal consultant to other area bars and venues dealing with neighborhood protesters and city issues. “And sometimes, I’ll put on a tie and become a formal consultant,” he says. Even when endless summer beckons, breaking up is hard to do. “We have a great sound guy, a great sound system,” says Connelly. “I guess I can’t say ‘we’ anymore, huh? It’s been hard to disassociate myself from it. I haven’t gotten used to it yet.”

While staring at the ceiling in the small hours of this morning I came to a revelation about an old boyfiriend who was addicted to Nyquil. It was a doomed romance. He was my mechanic. He had not a stick of furniture (save for his childhood twin bed) in his sprawling apartment. He admitted rather casually one day that he had dabbled in meth. He had a daughter he never saw. But, truthfully, it was when I watched him guzzle electric blue cough medicine every night that I realized maybe he wasn’t the one.

Now that I’m married, I still feel pretty sure he maybe set the bar low. But having come down with a nasty bug and giving Nyquil a try for the first time, I’m thinking he may have been on to something. I’ve gone through a bottle and a half since Thanksgiving and there have been peaceful, restful nights of oblivion as a result. My cat pawing my head? Unfazed. My husband yanking the covers? Who cares? But I’m lately wondering if continued self-medication is the best idea I’ve ever had, hence detailed knowledge of my ceiling.

I keep having visions of this woman featured in the most wrenching of all episodes of A&E’s Intervention (and trust me, I’ve seen most of them). She’d go to bed cradling mouthwash, wake up and puke in the wastebasket in front of her husband and children, slug some more of it down, then tuck it under her pillow again for good luck.

How many steps away am I from that? I’m not sure, but tonight I think I’ll sleep on it.

D.C. Tunnel will be able to dole out drinks again following a decision by the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board yesterday. Police chief Cathy Lanier suspended the club’s liquor license after a gun battle erupted between a group of men and four police officers outside the club early Saturday morning. The alcohol board decided to return the club’s license on a provisional basis. It must also hire reimbursable detail police officers to patrol the area outside the club, alcohol administration director Maria Delaney says.

D.C. Tunnel, also called Club Envy, was hosting a promoted event Friday night featuring TCB, Backyard Band, and Project Pat. According to an alcohol administration report, shortly after 3 a.m., four males exited the club and began shooting in the air towards MPD officers. Officer James Sulla then shot back, hitting one suspect in the foot and one suspect in the hand. Four men jumped into a Dodge Charger and sped away. The police followed them to the Edgewood Apartments at 600 Edgewood Street NE where they chased the suspects on foot. Two were apprehended, a police report says.

It’s curious that the Web site for Cobalt would be the place (still) promoting the Halloween high-heel race, since the club turns away anyone who’s not wearing sneakers, flats, or flip-flops.

The club’s no-heel rule is nonnegotiable, at least for women, as a friend and I found out this weekend when we tried to take a dance-happy 50-year-old out for his birthday. Turns out this is not a new policy, and is rumored to be rooted in either a lawsuit or a new floor the owners don’t want scratched. The official reason is it’s “simply for safety reasons.” Or here’s another thought: It’s a gay club. They don’t want straight chicks.

I have a message out to them inquiring if drag queens or Halloween racers are allowed to emphasize their calves. I’ll let you know if I hear back…

Just when you thought H Street NE was finally safe for nightlife, Frozen Tropics notes that local residents are considering a cap on tavern and nightclub licenses.

Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Mary Beatty says some residents who live nearby are concerned that noise from the bars could one day become a problem. “It’s not a problem at this point,” she says. “We want to get ahead of the issue.” The neighborhood recently instated a moratorium on single sales of beer and liquor, which went into effect Oct. 1.

Joe Englert, who owns five bars and clubs along H Street, says he thinks capping the area’s liquor licenses might be a good idea “if it’s smartly done, not puritanically done.” He thinks there should be no more than 40 or 50 bars or clubs allowed within 15 blocks. Beatty says she and her fellow commissioners have not come up with a number for the cap yet and are eager to hear neighbors opinions at a Nov. 20 public hearing.

Bryan Weaver, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Adams Morgan, says H Street should view his neighborhood as a kind of cautionary tale. “They’re like Adams Morgan in the 1980s,” he says. “They’re trying to create an entertainment district. We’re just trying to keep the circus in the tent.” Adams Morgan residents passed a similar moratorium last year, and D.C. Council approved it in July.

The party at Republic Gardens is over, at least for now. Whitney Restaurants Inc., the company that operated the club at 1355 U Street, was evicted Oct. 29 due to “over $200,000 [owed] in back rent [and] taxes,” landlord Henry McCall says.

U.S. Marshals carried out the eviction Monday morning. “That building has been gutted out,” McCall says. A day later, McCall changed the locks and padlocked the double doors at the club’s entrance. “I’ve never seen anybody I’ve wanted to shoot as much as him,” he says of his former tenant.

According to McCall, Whitney Restaurants Inc. stopped paying rent, water and electricity bills several years ago, prompting him to sue his tenant in July 2005. In February 2006, the two sides discussed a possible settlement of $105,029.05—less than the company actually owed, says McCall’s attorney Robert Bunn.

The settlement never came to pass. Elbert Robinson, Whitney’s president, says that’s because McCall was “unreasonable,” unwilling “even to make an agreement.” He suspects his landlord wants to redevelop the precious U Street property, with an assessed value of more than $1.6 million. But Bunn says the company never paid the settlement money, and when the lease expired in 2006, “no new lease was ever entered into.”

“We went to court and got judgment,” says McCall. “They were supposed to pay the money. When they didn’t pay the money, we got them evicted.”

McCall says he hopes to replace Republic Gardens with another nightclub. “I’d love to put a club there, because I feel they’re the ones making the money that can afford to pay,” he says.

And, according to Robinson, Republic Gardens will live on, too. He’s now “looking for a more suitable, more profitable location to go to,” he says.

That’s good news for the club’s loyal fans, who’ve swarmed the U Street institution since Marc Barnes owned the place in the ’90s. Daryl “Uncle Q” Francis, who DJ’d there a couple of times and hung out there often, says Republic Gardens “was one of the only establishments that catered to…sophisticated black folk without a too upper class attitude…It was always a nice place where you could see nice women.”

Alexis Diop, his girlfriend, was one of those women. She began bartending there soon after Barnes sold the club, in 2003, and says “the staff was like a family.”

A family with some secrets, perhaps: She said she didn’t know anything about the financial troubles the club was facing.

Francis says he’d heard rumors, but had no idea Republic Gardens was on the verge of eviction. “I was there Saturday night,” he says. “It was very much a surprise that it happened.”

Photographs by Darrow Montgomery

As Michael Grass reported in yesterday’s Express, there’s controversy brewing at The Library, the newly rechristened 12th Street NE watering hole. Apparently, some neighbors don’t like the beer selection at the dive bar, and others think there’s been an increase in litter since the bar reopened.

But the most interesting criticism comes from Kee Malesky, a corporate librarian, who finds the name offensive. I interviewed Malesky about her grievances yesterday, and here’s what she had to say:

1. It’s not a library. “A library is a place for people to study or read, have quiet community meetings. This is a bar with ten satellite TVs tuned to sports events.”
2. It provides an easy alibi for Catholic University’s slacker students. “Why else would they call it The Library unless to lie to their parents [and] professors about what they did last night?”
3. It impugns the dignity of librarians worldwide. “It’s snide, cynical, rude, and offensive to the neighbors and librarians everywhere,” she says.

Brookland neighbor Sandy Malone, however, says Malesky needs to lighten up. As an undergrad, she attended both Ohio State and Ohio University and says, at the time, both campuses had bars called The Library nearby. “It was like a joke,” she says. “It’s just a funny name.” She thinks Malesky should be grateful a place like The Library exists. “They need a campus bar,” she says of the students. “Otherwise, they’re going to come to the restaurants and push the neighbors out.”

Still, the whole Library spat got us wondering about other nerdily named establishments in the area. For example, has the Science Club received criticism for its name? Co-owner Steve Maguire says absolutely not. Nerds love the name, he says. “I’ve seen people stop traffic on 19th Street…They run up the stairs and say, ‘Science! We’re both biologists.’” Environmentalists also frequent the Dupont Circle spot, he says, adding, “we have been extremely well received by the scientific community and dorks in general.”

Craigslist Missed Connections are like stories in The Onion: Usually, the headline is the best part. A cursory overview of the past week’s connections yields a you said my dog was beautiful – w4m, a cruised you outside of bank, Clarendon - m4m – 35, and a MASSAGE CONNECTION - m 4 w.

Once you get into the body of the MC, though, everything gets a little shadier. When it’s at its best, Missed Connections serves as a quaint and amusing clearinghouse of urban meekness. But when at its worst, the site urges otherwise normal people to turn to the Web to holler at that super hot (and buff) at Target they were too shy to talk to in person. Often, these virtual hollerers get some real courage real quick.

On the receiving end of things, these Missed Connections have the power to spark far-flung, self-involved fantasies in the minds of the lonely or bored. Could I have been “super hot”? the MC browser asks himself. Could I have been “buff”? Could I, perchance, have been “at Target”? The MC browser posts a response: What was I wearing? What were you wearing? Is it me you’re looking for?

Let’s face it, Craigslist: Your Missed Connections are more likely to feed the megalomania of self-interested urban explorers than they are to connect mutually interested parties. I should know. Last weekend, I was misconnected.

I stumbled across the MC early on Saturday afternoon:

Crap Dance Party - m4w:

At the end of the night you tried to convince me to break out and dance, but I have slight shyness streak and am not much of a dancer. Then “Don’t Stop Believing” stopped abruptly and everyone scattered and I had to drive my friends home. Unfortunate, because you seemed like a cool, genuine, interesting group.

Maybe we’ll run across each other again soon.

This textbook scenario, I shudder to admit, fit my friends and I exactly: The Black Cat Backstage! The wallflower! The stirring finale by Journey! And now, the virtual nod to how we sort of met, but not really!

The reading of the post produced a strange feeling; a mix of awkwardness and odd satisfaction. Someone finds us cool, genuine, and interesting! we thought. And - bonus! - not in a creepy way! Still, though our wallflower did seem very nice, we felt uneasy with the idea of embarking further down the Missed Connections path. What happens when Missed Connections become connected? we asked ourselves. Nobody really knew. We decided to let the MC be.

But an anonymous 27-year-old woman was, apparently, eager to chase the connection down. Not a day later, this secondary post appeared:

Re: Crap Dance Party - w4m - 27:

I don’t think this was me, but it may very well have been someone in my ‘cool group’, since there were so few even granted access to the fabulousness of the Crap Dance Party. Can you provide more details? What was the person wearing? Where was she dancing?

My “cool, genuine, interesting” group located the post and took it in with mild resentment. Who was this 27 year old woman? Certainly, she had no affiliation with our “cool, genuine, interesting” group. She was even relatively sure that the post did not apply to her. Why, then, would she respond to our wallflower? Who did she think she was?

We considered generating a response - an MC of our own, one which straightened the facts about who the wallflower had, in fact, missed. That’s when we realized: We were genuinely considering posting the third in a series of Craigslist Missed Connections about people who almost danced to a shitty, overplayed Journey anthem together. Nothing about this was “cool,” “genuine,” or “interesting.”

Keep searching, wallflower: You will find some cool, genuine, interesting girls someday. But they probably won’t be on Craigslist.

It’s easy for us merlot-sippin’, Volvo-drivin’, Whole Foods–shoppin’ coastal elites to go through our boho lives without encountering, let alone deconstructing, the comedy of Larry the Cable Guy. But New York–raised comedian Steve Hofstetter has decided to stake his career on being the “Cure for the Cable Guy”—in fact, that’s the title of his 2006 album. Sure, Hofstetter tells some damn funny non-Larry jokes—he does what’s perhaps the definitive Taco Bell gag—but his profile has soared in the past year as his feud with the former Daniel Lawrence Whitney has reached the pages of the New Yorker and elsewhere. Behind the mic, the Columbia grad is every bit the culture warrior Mr. Blue Collar Comedy is, and in July he took things a step further, recording an eight-minute, only-a-quarter-joking anti-Larry YouTube manifesto. Overkill? Perhaps. But, as Hofstetter has written, “Lenny Bruce didn’t go to jail so someone could buy a wife-beater that says ‘Git-R-Done’!” Hofstetter performs at 9 & 11 p.m. Friday, Aug. 31, and Saturday, Sept. 1, at Riot Act Comedy Club, 1610 14th St. NW. $17. (202) 625-6229.

—Mike DeBonis

Tuesday night, a few friends and I headed down to Recessions to enjoy a send-off drink for a departing friend.

A group of about half a dozen fellow drinkers were seated adjacent to us. One was slumped, extremely intoxicated and possibly unconscious, at the head of the table. Recessions’ motto is “Get too MUCH for your money!”—their King Kong double-beer mugs sell at the price of a regular pint-sized brew—and this guy, it seems, had gotten too much for his money.

One of the conscious patrons at the table, a guy wearing an upside-down “NBA” headband, took two of the aforementioned mugs, raised them, and rammed them together close to the drunk man’s head. One shattered. The headbanded man shrugged. “I was trying to make a clinking noise,” he explained, pushing the broken mugs into a pile of empties. “Is this guy your friend?” he continued. “Do you know this guy?”
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It looks like Ron Hunt, the flamboyant owner of Nexus Gold Club and the Edge/Wet strip clubs, is first in line for a coveted spot in Ward 5.

The Alcoholic Beverage Control board determined Aug. 1 that Hunt had submitted a liquor license application for 2127 Queens Chapel Road NE well before his fellow strip club owners, Deloris and Ronald Dickson, submitted theirs for a space at 2122 24th Place NE.

That’s relevant because, under current law, two nude dancing clubs can’t be fewer than 600 feet apart, and the properties Hunt and the Dicksons have been eyeing are 19 feet apart at their nearest point. Only one of the displaced clubs can relocate to the spot, with the prized license going to the one who got there first.

According to an alcohol administration official, that’s Hunt, who, barring any formal protests from the neighborhood, seems poised to move forward with his application.

The Alcoholic Beverage Control Board voted to suspend H2O Restaurant & Lounge’s liquor license yesterday after a presentation from the attorney general’s office demonstrated that the restaurant was open and/or served alcohol past permissible hours on multiple occasions.

The suspension will last 13 days, from Sept. 4 through 16, and comes with a $24,000 fine, according to the alcohol administration’s director Maria Delaney. It can stay open during the suspension as long as it does not sell alcohol, she says.

H2O owner Abdul Khanu says he’s not certain whether he’ll keep the establishment open during the suspension.

The board’s decision comes a little more than two months after a patron was shot and killed outside of the H2O on May 27.

Prince of Petworth has the scoop, as yet unconfirmed by the Ruppert clan: The Warehouse complex is in negotiations to move to 11th and Park NW.