For five years she did aerial silks twenty feet up while a python wrapped the rigging — and the crowd gasped, sure the snake was one wrong move from attack. Lola knew better: he was just thermoregulating. She was a warm tree. The performance was real; the danger was theater. Then Vegas asked her to build a place where the animals could finally say no.
Lola never told anyone her real name — not in five years on the Memphis circuit at Jimbo's, where the signature act paired aerial performance with exotic-animal handling. She was hired on the spot, not for the dancing but because she was the only person in the city with the exact skillset: snake handling and aerial acrobatics — a herpetologist grandfather and a top-of-class aerial school behind her. She built a proper reptile environment in the back room — controlled heat, humidity, hiding spots, enrichment — and spent two hours before every shift not training her pythons but reading them. "You can't train a snake. You can only understand them. They tolerate you if you're predictable and safe. That's the relationship."
She became known as the best snake handler in Memphis — other clubs tried to poach her; she always said no, because Jimbo let her keep the Snake House while the high-end places wanted the act but would've stored the animals in glass boxes between shows. But underneath was the problem she never said out loud: the aerial work was art, the snake handling was skill, and the audience wasn't there for either. They were there for her body. The snakes were a gimmick. And she was tired of being one. "I perform for men. But you perform WITH me. That's the difference. And I'm starting to think I'd rather perform with animals than for men."
When the Memphis crew all evolved into the backbone of THE NET — Matt feeding the city, Sam running emergency coordination, the others moving on — Lola was still doing aerials with snakes for men who didn't understand the difference between exploitation and partnership. "What's my evolution?" she asked Jimbo. He was quiet a long time. "You treat animals like professional partners instead of props. There's gotta be somewhere that needs that."
October 2024, the phone rang: Marcus "Showtime" Mitchell, building entertainment infrastructure for the Vegas hub, needed a director who understood ethical animal performance — and Jimbo had told him about the woman who built a Snake House in the back of a club and spent two hours a day reading behavior instead of demanding tricks. "That's exactly the philosophy I need." The Desert Wildlife Sanctuary opened in January 2025: no cages, free-roaming habitats; no coercion, positive reinforcement only; no exploitation, every animal with a retirement plan and the option to simply not perform. Lola brought Caesar, Cleopatra, and Marcus — her three pythons of five years — to a Snake House ten times the size of the back room.
Six months in, a call came from a circus: a twelve-year-old Bengal tiger — also named Caesar — performing since he was two, underweight, dull-coated, pacing the stereotypic pace of chronic stress. Lola drove to evaluate him, found the "bigger cage" was two hundred square feet for an animal that needs thousands, and made a decision on the spot. "I'm taking him. Not for your circus. For him. He's retiring. Today." Marcus called lawyers, the lawyers called the federal wildlife regulators, and within forty-eight hours the tiger was legally hers. She drove him 2,500 miles herself, stopping every four hours, talking to him the whole way. By Wednesday he was in a one-acre habitat with trees and a pond — and Lola watched him explore for the first time in twelve years, and cried. Not because it was sad. Because it was what should have been happening all along.
Every entertainer in Vegas wanted animals; none wanted to talk about welfare. A magic producer needed six doves — "what happens to them after the show?" "Back in cages until the next one." "No deal." Her birds live in an aviary and fly; they perform, then they come home to space and enrichment. When he protested that cages were industry standard, she cut in: "Industry standard is exploitation. I'm offering partnership." Word spread. Most coordinators chose the Sanctuary — not because they suddenly cared, but because, as Marcus put it, happy animals are simply better performers. Ethics and entertainment turned out not to be opposites but partners.
Her aerial background became the Sanctuary's secret: she doesn't train birds to fly, she structures flight patterns audiences find beautiful out of what birds do anyway — which is how her flocks fly formation with Margo Delacroix's flying cars in the Desert Eagle show, the birds simply navigating around large objects in their airspace. And her favorite accident: a Prairie Dog Village that reads structural instability in the Mux Loop tunnels because detecting shifting ground is literally what prairie dogs evolved to do. Tourists think they're tunnel inspectors. Lola knows they're just living enriched prairie-dog lives that happen to intersect with human needs. That's the whole thesis — the audience determines whether a performance is partnership or exploitation. The difference isn't the act. It's who benefits from the relationship.
The Sanctuary grew to its 200th performance animal — retired circus cats, former magic-show doves, casino attractions, film animals, every one with a retirement plan. A Nebraska vet, Dr. Clay “Kershaw” Stevens, makes quarterly visits and calls it a new standard. Lola disagrees only on the word new: "It's just what should've been happening all along."
Lola, across the network
The Vegas lattice