An old soldier with plenty of battle wounds, she’s been called “Pebbles,” because when she started working at her current job, she had short red hair tied up in a ponytail. Kayla Miller has a much different nickname now, one that suits her far better.

“A lot of coworkers call me ‘The Oven’s Beast,’” she says without a hint of sarcasm.

When the pizza maker isn’t bartending, training new staff, working the register, rolling dough or topping pizzas, she’s doing her favorite job — working the ovens at Shakespeare’s Pizza.

As Miller works, it’s like watching a quarterback throw a perfect spiral, a basketball guard drive into the lane and scoring through contact, a shortstop effortlessly fielding a ball and throwing it to first. There is almost an instinctive quality to her work.

“I just naturally start moving,” Miller says. “I’m the type of person who can’t stand in one spot too long.”

She means it too, as she cleans an oven, constructs a pizza box, slices a pizza, announces the order, places another pizza in the box, slices it, and gets the boxed pizza out for delivery seconds before handing a customer their pizza order. She does this in a span of time so short, most would still be thinking about how to clean an oven by the time she’s done.

Despite the workload, Miller finds time to connect with customers.

“I love giving little kids dough,” Miller says as some children walked up to the register with their guardian. Later, as a child walked up to Shakespeare’s pizza counter wide-eyed, Miller asked her if she wanted some pizza dough to play with. The little girl’s eyes sparkled with joy as she had a new toy to enjoy. Miller goes to go wash her hands, like she has to do after she touches anything, be it the register or pizza dough.

“Emily! Emily! Pizza time for Emily!” Miller calls out over the microphone. Although she normally sticks to alerting customers that it’s “pizza time,” sometimes those with first names and last initials similar to a celebrity (like Drew B.) will get a call like “Drew Barrymore! Your pizza’s ready!”

As she hands a woman (presumably Emily) a pizza, a co-worker at the register alerts her that she has a delivery of flowers.

“That was weird,” Miller quips after she put the flowers away. Even though it was weird, it has apparently happened in the past.

“There used to be a regular who always brought me flowers,” said Miller. “So I occasionally get flowers, and they make me happy.”

Miller has been friendly with regulars in the past, even to the point of weirding them out by knowing their orders.

“We get a lot of a regulars who freak out when I know their order,” Miller says. “They freak out, but they love it.”

Back at the ovens, Miller is cleaning one out and a “fireball,” a hot chunk of food, flies out and hits her in the leg. These types of instances are common.

“I have so many battle wounds,” she says as she points to a scar on her wrist. “Like here, when I was cutting cheese too fast, a hot piece jumped out and burned me.” It takes a while to notice the scars though, as they’re covered up with tattoos.

After she clears out the oven and glances at the location where the fireball hit, she stands on her tip-toes to place a pizza in the far back of the top oven, looking surprisingly challenged for someone who had move so fluidly only seconds before.

“Hardest part is loading the back of ovens because I’m very short, so I have to stand on my toes,” Miller says. “I guess it’s a downfall.”

Despite her one disadvantage, Miller enjoys being the final quality check for pizzas, the last line of defense, the rock of the kitchen.

“I like when I get called in because they need me,” says the five-year veteran. And as the crowd starts to pile in, hours before the MU basketball game, she high fives a co-worker, like a basketball player after a teammate hits a big three.

“That pizza had the fishies,” she says, referring to anchovies, which strike her as weird. “They’re nasty.”

Despite having to deal with anchovies, Miller loves her job.

“Of course (I love it),” Miller said. “I’ll be here for a while.”

And after her shift is over?

“I love the bar after work,” she says.

And just like that, she goes back to running the ovens like a machine, doing things so fast that no one will ever know all the work that goes into making one simple pizza.