Michelle's menagerie

Scorpions and lizards and teenagers, oh my!

Urban Eye by S.I. Rosenbaum

Michelle holds the scorpion cradled in her hand. Its blue-black claws curl against her palm, and her thumb rests under the hook of its stinger. It has never stung her.

The scorpion is named Skeedaddle. It is not Michelle Lunceford's pet, but her livelihood. Several times a week, sometimes two or three times a day, she packs the scorpion, along with her lizards, huge tortoise, parrot, tarantula, iguana, ferret, chinchilla, boa, and python, into her van and drives to a classroom or a birthday party. Painted on the back of the van are the words HERE COMES THE MENAGERIE! Only Michelle handles the animals. Only she lifts the cages and coolers into and out of the van.

Michelle Lunceford is a dark-haired woman with feathered bangs and a tattoo of a slim green lizard around her right wrist. For eight years, she has run Michelle's Menagerie out of her Tewksbury home. It's her job, she says, and her calling. But it's not something that she'd ever imagined doing.

"I hated animals," she says. "I remember not wanting to go near my sister when she'd caught a snake or a turtle. I thought it was so grotesque."

Michelle worked as a secretary until she was 23, when she found herself married and alone all day with her infant daughter. That was when she started taking in foster children. She had wanted toddlers; the state sent her teenage girls.

"I wanted to do right by the kids," Michelle says. "But the kids had been so neglected, so abused, they didn't trust me." Then she read about animal therapy and decided to buy each girl a pet. She'd present the animal -- a bunny or guinea pig -- in a cardboard box.

"This animal is yours if you want it," she would say. "But you're going to have to learn how to take care of it." Within the hour, the girl would ask if they could get a cage.

Michelle would put the girl in her car and drive to the pet store -- the farthest one. On the long drive, the girls would start to talk. "They would say, `Can we get a real big cage? Our house was real small,' " Michelle remembers. "Or they would ask to get extra food -- they were always hungry. None of the kids would say things about themselves, but they would talk about the animals."

She wanted the girls to know it wasn't their fault they were in foster care, that taking care of another life wasn't easy.

But with time, Michelle, too, became fascinated by the animals. She volunteered at the Stone Zoo, in Stoneham, and then she started doing animal shows on her own.

At birthday parties and in classrooms, Michelle tells kids all about the strange creatures she holds in her arms. At times this makes her feel that she is not the shy person she thinks she is. "It's a good way to escape from yourself," she says. "I'm not Michelle Lunceford. I'm the Animal Lady."

She now keeps all her animals, including the rodents she breeds as lizard food, in separate rooms added onto the house. One room holds only her two biggest monitor lizards. Michelle taps on the glass of their cages. "Hey, how ya doin'?" she asks them. "This is Mum!"

The monitors have razor-sharp teeth and powerful jaw muscles. "You could lose a couple of dogs and cats if you had one of these loose in a neighborhood," Michelle says. She holds it carefully, with the head facing away from her and the tail locked under her arm. The older monitor is named Diesel, for Michelle's second husband, a truck driver. The name was a bribe -- she had bought the lizard on impulse, without consulting him.

She takes people and animals into her life quickly; she had known her husband only six months before they married. Later, there was the night when she called him and told him to pick up some Pampers on the way home. The Department of Social Services had finally sent her the four young siblings she'd wanted years before. Five years later, when the kids were cleared for adoption, it was her husband who said, "No way are these kids going anywhere."

Now Michelle's house teems with 200 animals and three teenagers (her two oldest children are grown and on their own). "It's a sign of being insecure and needing to be needed," she says. "It's knowing that if I don't get up in the morning, someone or something is going to lose out."