The very first Ghost Light column I wrote back in summer of 2020, I interviewed Markie Gray, the incoming managing director for Raven Theatre. Gray was hired to work alongside artistic director Cody Estle, who assumed the job in November 2017 from founders (and married couple) Michael Menendian and JoAnn Montemurro. (The board’s decision to remove the original artistic leadership team, who started the company in 1983, led to residual bad feelings, as Deanna Isaacs wrote about in the Reader in 2019.)

Now Estle is heading off to Milwaukee to take over as artistic director for Next Act Theatre. He’s replacing David Cecsarini, who has headed up Next Act since it formed over 32 years ago from the merger of two other companies, Theatre Tesseract and Next Generation Theatre.

For Estle, leaving Raven now means that he and Gray have met many of the goals they set during the pandemic shutdown. In her first interview with me, Gray said, “To me, what I find actually really exciting about having this opportunity is that organizations like this very rarely have the chance to pause and think about the actual organization. And think about the things that are the foundation of all of the art that we make. And that is how we are treating our staff, how we are managing our boards, how we’re thinking about EDI, how we’re looking at ourselves as an organization. It so often gets pushed to the bottom of the list, especially in smaller companies.”

When we talked late last week, Estle noted, “I think one of the reasons I sort of felt like it would be an OK time to leave Raven—not that there’s ever an OK time or a good time—was that I’d done everything that I had said that I wanted to do. Except for the completion of the construction in the east stage. [That’s the larger of Raven’s two venues.] That’s going to start at the end of November after Private Lives. I had done everything that I set out to do, and the money has been raised for the project, or almost raised for the renovation project. When I came on, it was like, ‘We need to diversify the programming. We need to expand the staff, we need to get health insurance for the staff. We need to make sure that the theater is moving from non-Equity to Equity.’”

That last goal became a reality this year when Raven made the move to the Chicago Area Theatre (CAT) contract. In talking about that shift in July 2021, Gray noted to me, “One of the reasons why I was particularly well-suited for this position is that I have experience working in Equity theaters before. And so I was able to sort of help through the transition.”

Gray is staying on as managing director, and the board will announce a search for Estle’s successor shortly. He starts at Next Act in December. Though he’s never worked there before, Estle notes that he asked sound designer and composer Josh Schmidt, who has worked there and with whom he’s collaborated on productions at Northlight Theatre (Schmidt now lives in Milwaukee), about the job listing when it posted.

“He told me it’s been around a long time, it’s Equity, they have their own space, and it might be worthwhile to apply. So I did. Their programming is focused on things that are happening in our lives today, or things that are happening in our world today that may affect our lives. The last play that they did was Kill Move Paradise. [James Ijames’s play is about a purgatory for Black victims of police killings; Schmidt was sound designer for the Next Act production.] The programming that they’re doing is exciting and it’s fresh. They’re not doing Steel Magnolias.”

But Estle, an alum of Columbia College Chicago who has spent most of his professional life here, notes that he’s not abandoning Chicago completely. “I made sure in the contract up there that I can get out and direct one show a year.”

Swan song: 16th Street Theater’s current production of Siena Marilyn Ledger’s Man and Moon, starring Clare Wols and Peter Danger Wilde, will be their final show. Credit Glenn Felix Willoughby

16th Street closes up shopLate last week, the board of directors for Berwyn’s 16th Street Theater announced that they were suspending all operations at the end of this year. Their current production of Man and Moon by Siena Marilyn Ledger, running through November 13, will be their last full staging; the company’s Write Collective will say farewell with the final virtual play reading on Friday, December 2, at 7 PM, and there will be a closing-out party Saturday, December 3, 1-4 PM at the Outta Space in Berwyn.

16th Street was founded by longtime Chicago director Ann Filmer in 2007, after she and her husband, sound designer and composer Barry Bennett, moved to Berwyn with their daughter. Upon discovering that there was a 49-seat basement theater space available in the North Berwyn Cultural Center on 16th Street, Filmer worked with North Berwyn Park District’s executive director Joe Vallez to create 16th Street Theater, which operated on a CAT Equity contract and focused primarily on new plays, eventually becoming a member of the National New Play Network. In fall 2018, 16th Street announced that they were going to take over an old VFW hall on Harlem Avenue. But that never materialized.

The company returned from the pandemic with Natalie Y. Moore’s abortion drama, The Billboard, produced in an auditorium downtown at Northwestern University. That production won a Jeff Award last month in the short production category for best new work.

Filmer departed 16th Street last fall; longtime Chicago director Jean Gottlieb had been serving as interim artistic director. The board didn’t indicate the specific reasons behind the closing. In the announcement on the website, they stated: “We are no longer a program of, or in any way associated with, the North Berwyn Park District. The North Berwyn Park District is the sole owner of the name ’16th Street Theater,’ and plans to create a children’s theater with that name at some point in the future. Please direct all inquiries about the future 16th Street Theater to the North Berwyn Park District.”

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Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

When tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan died in 1993, he hadn’t lived in Chicago for nearly 40 years, but he was still beloved here. “Clifford’s personality was warm and sincere, just like his tone on the saxophone,” Chicago tenor titan Von Freeman told Howard Reich at the Tribune. “He was a beautiful person—he helped me and a lot of other people get some recordings and gigs in New York.” 

In the same obituary, Chicago drummer Wilbur Campbell called Jordan’s approach to music “incredibly serious and strong-willed.” One of Jordan’s longtime collaborators, trumpeter and flugelhorn player Art Farmer, reflected on their bond: “I think Clifford and I got on so well because we both liked to make [musical] statements, as opposed to playing bunches of notes,” he explained to the Trib. “Clifford developed an individual voice. He was one of the genuine jazz players. He had extremely sensitive ears—he could match his sound to whatever ensemble he was playing with.” 

Reader critic Peter Margasak reviewed a Jordan box set in 2013, calling him “one of the most versatile representatives of the Chicago tenor sound that emerged from DuSable High School under the leadership of Captain Walter Dyett—other exponents included Gene Ammons, Von Freeman, Johnny Griffin, and John Gilmore.” 

Jordan was celebrated during his life, and many of his albums remain highly regarded—in terms of recordings, he was one of the most prolific jazz artists of his era. But I don’t think he gets the shine he should, and Margasak agrees: “He doesn’t seem as revered as his cohorts these days,” he wrote. “I think part of the reason for that is that Jordan was a curious and elegant musician who tried on many hats during his career.”

Clifford Laconia Jordan was born in Chicago on September 2, 1931, and he began playing piano (after a fashion) when he was still a baby. “I’d sit on the pedals and holler,” he said in an interview for music publisher Concord, “with the loud pedal on.” He soon began taking music lessons, and he also became fascinated with the delivery men in his community, who drove horse-drawn carriages to move such goods as coal, milk, and ice. 

Jordan would follow the drivers to their stables. “The black intelligentsia—doctors and lawyers who were sportsmen as well—frequented the stables,” he told Concord, “and that’s where you heard all the good music on the jukebox.” At age 13, Jordan took up the saxophone, and by 16, inspired by his hero Charlie Parker, he’d decided it was his life’s calling. 

Jordan was lucky to study with the hard-as-nails Dyett at Bronzeville’s DuSable High, where the music program produced a steady stream of future legends. “A lot of people wanted to be in the band but the instructor wouldn’t let any bad apples in there,” he recalled. “Once he detected you couldn’t play he’d kick you out of the band room. He didn’t stand for any foolishness.”

Jordan’s first gig was at a dance where he led a band for five dollars per musician. Soon he was playing gritty R&B with the likes of bassist-songwriter Willie Dixon, jump-blues journeyman Joseph “Cool Breeze” Bell, and drummer-bandleaders Jack “Cowboy” Cooley (who’d played with Albert Ammons & His Rhythm Kings) and Armand “Jump” Jackson. 

Jordan found he had to change gears after his relocation. “In New York I never could get the rock and roll gigs or commercial gigs I used to get in Chicago,” he told Concord, “so I was a little disappointed. They made me a specialist—a jazz saxophone player.” 

In 1960 Jordan formed a quartet with pianist Cedar Walton, who’d become a longtime collaborator. That band recorded the excellent LP Spellbound for Riverside, then jumped labels to Jazzland for 1962’s Bearcat. 

Beginning in the early 60s, Jordan worked for several years with drummer Max Roach. He played in big bands with Lloyd Price (one of his few R&B gigs during this period) and Clark Terry. In 1963 he recorded with Eric Dolphy, and the following year they both joined the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop sextet, which toured Europe. Jordan released These Are My Roots: Clifford Jordan Plays Leadbelly for Atlantic in 1965 and concurrently continued his busy sideman schedule, recording with the likes of Charles McPherson and Joe Zawinul.

Jordan had always enjoyed playing in Europe, and he moved to Belgium in 1969. America drew him back the following year, though. After Jordan made a failed attempt to start his own imprint, called Frontier, he struck a deal with Strata-East Records, owned by pianist Stanley Cowell and trumpeter Charles Tolliver. Margasak called it “one of the most prolific and highest quality artist-run labels in jazz history.” 

Clifford Jordan died of lung cancer on March 27, 1993, and he’s still being honored publicly. This past September 11, producer Arnie Perez and his company VTY Jazz Arts presented a quintet tribute to Jordan at the Cutting Room in New York City. Perhaps soon his name will begin appearing where it belongs—right alongside those of John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker.

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On what would have been her 77th birthday, friends, family, and community advocates gathered in October to celebrate the late “Mama” Gloria Allen, whose long life linked the present to queer history, and who used her stunning success at self-realization to improve the lives of others like her.

Born in 1945 and identifying as female from her young childhood, Allen had the mind-blowing luck to be born to a Jet magazine centerfold and Bronzeville nightclub showgirl, and a grandmother who made outfits for the scene’s strippers and legendary female impersonators. She passed in high school and transitioned in her mid-20s, working as an X-ray technician, clerk, and caregiver for the sick and aged.

Allen was a quintessential Chicagoan, a lady from the south side who loved wearing furs, heels, and jewelry, and whose biggest claim to fame was her establishment in her later years of an old-fashioned charm school for young homeless transgender people at the Center on Halsted, which hosted her October memorial. That five-year and self-funded effort inspired a play, Charm, that opened at Steppenwolf in 2015 and moved off-Broadway in 2017. A documentary about her, Mama Gloria, premiered in 2020.

The trans rights pioneer died last June in her home in the Town Hall Apartments for LGBTQ+ elders on Halsted Street in Lakeview East.

“The most important thing that I want to say is well done, Gloria. This was a life well lived,” said Don Bell, her across-the-hall neighbor. “Let’s not mourn because she’s gone; let’s celebrate because she was here with all of us.”

Allen was phenomenal and exceptional, Bell said, pointing to her achievement of a full life expectancy despite the horrific rates of homicide that Black trans women endure. “She maintained an intimate and direct relationship with her family of origin, unlike most of us in the LGBT community who are estranged from our families,” he said. “She died quietly in her own home in her own bed—in peace, rather than as a victim of violence. Well done, Gloria Allen.”

Family members recalled her with warmth and love, from fighting off her childhood bullies to introducing her to significant others after her transition, to receiving a warm welcome as a septuagenarian at her Englewood High School alumni group. 

“She was born in a time when it was very difficult to acknowledge yourself, as you say now, as an LGBTQ person without all the ridicule, harm, and misjudgment that went along with it,” Allen’s cousin, Gail Collier, said at the event at the Center on Halsted. “Gloria was in that era, and during that time that we grew up and I look back over her life, no matter what, she was just bubbling and beautiful.”

“When she stepped outside those doors of her home, she was a proud gay person—and I say that at that time to no disrespect to the community now in its latest style,” Collier continued. “She wore being a sissy as a badge of honor. When she transitioned into Gloria as a full physical transgender human being, she wore that even bolder, beautifully, and brightly.”

Allen’s nephew, Dr. Benton Johnson II, called her life one of toil for trans lives that matter.

“She had pain, she had struggles, she had triumphs and successes, and she had failures. But through it all she was compelled to work for others,” he said. “For five years, she paused to make others great. It was the way that she worked. Her way was charitable, and she gave.”

Like many LGBTQ+ south siders, Allen moved to the north side to be with her family of choice, as Bell said in an interview. He noted again that her own family supported her through the move.

“She didn’t have to make a dichotomy between the two, because her family of origin supported her in being an active part of her family of choice,” he continued. “She had the best of both worlds.”

“She was one of the persons who defined ‘up here,’ who defined the neighborhood. She was one of the advantages of the neighborhood. And what she did was, she worked with the ‘ugly issues’ that people don’t want to talk about, like the lack of welcome of people of color to this neighborhood, the lack of welcome to young trans kids and young kids of color who came from other parts of the city,” Bell said

That issue has been one of contention in the, for better or worse, center of Chicago’s LGBTQ+ life for decades. More than three-quarters of Lakeview’s population is white. Drexel University Sociologist Jay Orne detailed white neighborhood residents’ organized opposition to “gay kids on the street” (in the words of the residents) in the 2011 ethnography Boystown. It is not uncommon for residents to call police on rowdy young Black queer people, who may come to the neighborhood for the safety and security (corporeal as well as spiritual) the area offers LGBTQ+ people who want to live openly.

Allen’s claim to fame might be her charm school for trans youth, but Bell said she had a “special mission with youngsters of color, with young Black kids and young Brown kids who came from other sections of the city and were not welcomed by people who live here.”

“Gloria interceded in the interest of those children with security here at the center, with people who were not welcoming here at the center, and she became a place where they could find shelter and love,” he added. 

The pair actually met at the center, when Allen spoke out against security profiling Black teenagers and white bystanders commenting they should not have been there. (In 2020, the center fired its security firm owned by a police officer accused of an off-duty 2013 racist attack against a Black security guard outside a gay bar and hired a Black-owned firm to replace it.)

“She and I were sitting at a table together, and Gloria was the only one inviting the kids over, because we would intercede on behalf of those kids, because the situation did not respect our relationship with the kids of color,” Bell, himself a Black native south sider, said. 

“The thing is, this is what we experienced over the years, too. My experiences go back 30 or 40 years across Halsted Street with the same kind of thing happening. I empathize with the kids, and so I interceded and Gloria interceded so we could protect them against the martial forces of security or having the police called, and also the unwelcoming attitudes of others who are here. If this is supposed to be Chicago’s LGBT center, it includes everybody,” said Bell.

Center on Halsted representatives sang Allen’s praises at the celebration; her name will soon be etched into one of its windows as a permanent tribute. Illinois House of Representatives Majority Leader Greg Harris read a proclamation the legislature passed in the trailblazer’s honor and recalled his memories of her in the clubs and bars as a gay youth and during his early activism in the 1980s. 

The highest-ranking gay elected official in Illinois history empathized with Allen’s childhood, recalling his own itinerant one in small towns outside of Air Force bases, where he was picked on for being a “sissy.”

That changed in the 1970s, when he got a job in Chicago after college. “The first thing we did is we found the clubs,” he said, and Allen was there. Twenty years later, she was there at protests and actions around the AIDS pandemic.

“All those decades that Mama Gloria was out there in the streets and organizing and taking care of kids and showing them love and their worth, and bringing along the next set of leaders who are around today, and you understand the courage and the strength and the power of a woman like that,” Harris said.

The celebration of life ended, appropriately, with everyone gathered singing the refrain from Stevie Wonder’s 1980 song “Happy Birthday.”

Read More

On what would have been her 77th birthday, friends, family, and community advocates gathered in October to celebrate the late “Mama” Gloria Allen, whose long life linked the present to queer history, and who used her stunning success at self-realization to improve the lives of others like her.

Born in 1945 and identifying as female from her young childhood, Allen had the mind-blowing luck to be born to a Jet magazine centerfold and Bronzeville nightclub showgirl, and a grandmother who made outfits for the scene’s strippers and legendary female impersonators. She passed in high school and transitioned in her mid-20s, working as an X-ray technician, clerk, and caregiver for the sick and aged.

Allen was a quintessential Chicagoan, a lady from the south side who loved wearing furs, heels, and jewelry, and whose biggest claim to fame was her establishment in her later years of an old-fashioned charm school for young homeless transgender people at the Center on Halsted, which hosted her October memorial. That five-year and self-funded effort inspired a play, Charm, that opened at Steppenwolf in 2015 and moved off-Broadway in 2017. A documentary about her, Mama Gloria, premiered in 2020.

The trans rights pioneer died last June in her home in the Town Hall Apartments for LGBTQ+ elders on Halsted Street in Lakeview East.

“The most important thing that I want to say is well done, Gloria. This was a life well lived,” said Don Bell, her across-the-hall neighbor. “Let’s not mourn because she’s gone; let’s celebrate because she was here with all of us.”

Allen was phenomenal and exceptional, Bell said, pointing to her achievement of a full life expectancy despite the horrific rates of homicide that Black trans women endure. “She maintained an intimate and direct relationship with her family of origin, unlike most of us in the LGBT community who are estranged from our families,” he said. “She died quietly in her own home in her own bed—in peace, rather than as a victim of violence. Well done, Gloria Allen.”

Family members recalled her with warmth and love, from fighting off her childhood bullies to introducing her to significant others after her transition, to receiving a warm welcome as a septuagenarian at her Englewood High School alumni group. 

“She was born in a time when it was very difficult to acknowledge yourself, as you say now, as an LGBTQ person without all the ridicule, harm, and misjudgment that went along with it,” Allen’s cousin, Gail Collier, said at the event at the Center on Halsted. “Gloria was in that era, and during that time that we grew up and I look back over her life, no matter what, she was just bubbling and beautiful.”

“When she stepped outside those doors of her home, she was a proud gay person—and I say that at that time to no disrespect to the community now in its latest style,” Collier continued. “She wore being a sissy as a badge of honor. When she transitioned into Gloria as a full physical transgender human being, she wore that even bolder, beautifully, and brightly.”

Allen’s nephew, Dr. Benton Johnson II, called her life one of toil for trans lives that matter.

“She had pain, she had struggles, she had triumphs and successes, and she had failures. But through it all she was compelled to work for others,” he said. “For five years, she paused to make others great. It was the way that she worked. Her way was charitable, and she gave.”

Like many LGBTQ+ south siders, Allen moved to the north side to be with her family of choice, as Bell said in an interview. He noted again that her own family supported her through the move.

“She didn’t have to make a dichotomy between the two, because her family of origin supported her in being an active part of her family of choice,” he continued. “She had the best of both worlds.”

“She was one of the persons who defined ‘up here,’ who defined the neighborhood. She was one of the advantages of the neighborhood. And what she did was, she worked with the ‘ugly issues’ that people don’t want to talk about, like the lack of welcome of people of color to this neighborhood, the lack of welcome to young trans kids and young kids of color who came from other parts of the city,” Bell said

That issue has been one of contention in the, for better or worse, center of Chicago’s LGBTQ+ life for decades. More than three-quarters of Lakeview’s population is white. Drexel University Sociologist Jay Orne detailed white neighborhood residents’ organized opposition to “gay kids on the street” (in the words of the residents) in the 2011 ethnography Boystown. It is not uncommon for residents to call police on rowdy young Black queer people, who may come to the neighborhood for the safety and security (corporeal as well as spiritual) the area offers LGBTQ+ people who want to live openly.

Allen’s claim to fame might be her charm school for trans youth, but Bell said she had a “special mission with youngsters of color, with young Black kids and young Brown kids who came from other sections of the city and were not welcomed by people who live here.”

“Gloria interceded in the interest of those children with security here at the center, with people who were not welcoming here at the center, and she became a place where they could find shelter and love,” he added. 

The pair actually met at the center, when Allen spoke out against security profiling Black teenagers and white bystanders commenting they should not have been there. (In 2020, the center fired its security firm owned by a police officer accused of an off-duty 2013 racist attack against a Black security guard outside a gay bar and hired a Black-owned firm to replace it.)

“She and I were sitting at a table together, and Gloria was the only one inviting the kids over, because we would intercede on behalf of those kids, because the situation did not respect our relationship with the kids of color,” Bell, himself a Black native south sider, said. 

“The thing is, this is what we experienced over the years, too. My experiences go back 30 or 40 years across Halsted Street with the same kind of thing happening. I empathize with the kids, and so I interceded and Gloria interceded so we could protect them against the martial forces of security or having the police called, and also the unwelcoming attitudes of others who are here. If this is supposed to be Chicago’s LGBT center, it includes everybody,” said Bell.

Center on Halsted representatives sang Allen’s praises at the celebration; her name will soon be etched into one of its windows as a permanent tribute. Illinois House of Representatives Majority Leader Greg Harris read a proclamation the legislature passed in the trailblazer’s honor and recalled his memories of her in the clubs and bars as a gay youth and during his early activism in the 1980s. 

The highest-ranking gay elected official in Illinois history empathized with Allen’s childhood, recalling his own itinerant one in small towns outside of Air Force bases, where he was picked on for being a “sissy.”

That changed in the 1970s, when he got a job in Chicago after college. “The first thing we did is we found the clubs,” he said, and Allen was there. Twenty years later, she was there at protests and actions around the AIDS pandemic.

“All those decades that Mama Gloria was out there in the streets and organizing and taking care of kids and showing them love and their worth, and bringing along the next set of leaders who are around today, and you understand the courage and the strength and the power of a woman like that,” Harris said.

The celebration of life ended, appropriately, with everyone gathered singing the refrain from Stevie Wonder’s 1980 song “Happy Birthday.”

Read More

Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

Read More

Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

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In this young NBA season, the Chicago Bulls are still trying to figure out who they are without Lonzo Ball — and it’s been a difficult road to travel.

But, with the emergence of Ayo Dosunmu taking a second-year leap, the future looks bright. Still, this team has lacked the defensive intensity that Ball brought, and they’ll have to continue working through that.

Speaking of defense, the Bulls were down throughout the entirety of their matchup with the Brooklyn Nets on Tuesday night. Finally, towards the end of the third quarter, Chicago started to come alive. The Bulls outscored the Nets by three in the third quarter, but saved their best for last.

The story, so far, has been starting slow, picking it up and not being able to close it out. Billy Donovan’s crew changed that narrative Tuesday night, in large part due to a clutch performance by Zach LaVine.

Zach LaVine is polarizing in terms of his superstar capabilities, but the Chicago Bulls saw him come alive in this game against Brooklyn.

LaVine was given the bag this offseason — but what other choice did the Bulls have? Did everyone think he was worth that contract? Of course not — and the truth is, he wasn’t worth it. But, in today’s league, there was no other option.

Many times over, LaVine has proven he cannot be “the guy” for the Bulls. We have seen flashes, and he’s been a very good player in Chicago. Yet, he has not become the superstar he needs to be if the Bulls are going to truly compete for a championship.

In the fourth quarter Tuesday night, though, LaVine completely took over. Through three quarters, LaVine had just nine points and looked utterly deflated. He looked like, once again, a guy who wasn’t capable of taking over a game when the Bulls needed someone.

But then, something dazzling happened.

LaVine went off for 20 fourth quarter points.

The Bulls pulled away thanks to LaVine’s explosion in the final quarter and won the game by a score of 108-99.

LaVine was able to overshadow a strong performance by Kevin Durant, who ended with 32 himself.

This was an encouraging performance from LaVine, who we’ve seen do this from time to time. But, the question has always been, when will it get to the point where we see this more often? Will it ever happen?

LaVine’s days as an above-the-rim guy might be behind him due to all of his knee trouble, therefore it might be time for him to focus solely on being the scorer the Bulls need. As he did in this one, LaVine is capable of taking over the ball game. But, the consistency has yet to show up behind that characteristic.

For now, we can savor the victory and know that LaVine does have that ‘dog’ in him. Hopefully, we see it let loose more often down the line.

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