Andrea Carla Michaels Biography
Andrea Carla Michaels is an American crossword puzzle creator and company naming consultant. She was a comedian and TV writer. Michaels’ filmography includes Designing Women (1986), Wordplay (1986), and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (1999).
Andrea Carla Age
She was born Andrea Carla Eisenberg in 1959, age 65 years, in the United States of America.
Andrea Education
Michaels graduated from Minneapolis’ Northrop Collegiate School (later the Blake School) in 1976, having skipped a grade and a half. In 1980, at the age of 20, she graduated from Harvard University with a psychology degree.
Andrea Carla Family
Michaels was the youngest of three daughters raised by Carol (née Kossin) and M. Michael Eisenberg, a surgeon at the University of Minnesota. She enjoyed doing jigsaw puzzles, playing board games, and assisting her father with the Sunday New York Times crossword as a child. She began playing chess at the age of five and competed from the ages of 11 to 15, winning five consecutive Minnesota women’s championships and three national junior titles.
Andrea Carla Career
In the 1980s, Michaels began working in theater, performing in clubs, writing periodicals, and appearing on television programs. She took the name “Michaels”, modified from her father’s name. She moved to Los Angeles and worked in the television industry as a freelance writer on programs such as Wordplay and Challengers, The Guardian of The Fighting Game, and as a writer for the sitcom The Making of Women. She also appeared on shows such as Jeopardy! in 1988 (where she finished second in the race, which still holds a record for another day) and Wheel of Fortune in 1991 (where she won the RV). She joined a Scrabble club and became a national team player and coach. Michaels moved to San Francisco in 1984. Before that, she worked as a freelancer for other companies before founding Acme Naming, which specializes in creating names for companies and products. In 2012, she wrote an essay about infertility for Henriette Mantel’s book No Kidding: Women Writers Who Skipped Parenthood (2013).
Michaels’ defining work began in the 1980s; she wrote word games and trivia for Games magazine and puzzles for TV Guide. Her first New York Times crossword puzzle, published on June 12, 2000, featured an earthquake theme and a “jagged” grid design. In 2017, she competed with college friend Neil deGrasse Tyson. As of November 2023, she had published 85 matches in The Times, 54 of which were collaborations and 61 of which were published on Mondays (the easiest match of the week to solve but not to create), earning her the nickname “Monday Queen” along with Lynne Rempel. She was awarded the Merl Reagle MEMORIAL Award for “Lifetime Achievement in Crossword Puzzle Design” at the 2024 American Crossword Puzzle Championship.
On Christmas Eve 2015, Michaels began working for the homeless near San Francisco, handing out pizza and occasionally other items for free and becoming known as “The Pizza Lady.” She asked Nob Hill Pizza & Shawarma in Nob Hill to throw away leftovers instead of reheating them for distribution on Polk Street, where approximately twenty tablets were distributed each day. She distributed free clothing as well as food with “wrong expiration dates” from Golden Veggie Market after the pizzeria began making pizzas to order only during the COVID-19 pandemic throughout 2020. In 2023, she also shipped more pizzas to Nobhill Pizza and set up a website. Efforts are underway in the area to identify and return stolen luggage. On October 17, 2023, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors awarded her a Certificate of Honor in recognition of her service as the Pizza Lady, her efforts to rehabilitate stolen goods, and her work to help control housing prices.
Andrea Carla Net Worth
Carla has an estimated net worth of 1 million dollars.