After a period of declining health and pain, Elyse Versé found peace and rest.  She passed away on February 27, 2024.

Elyse was born in the Bronx, New York in 1954.

She moved to San Diego, California in the late 1970s and to Los Angeles in the early 1980s.

She worked at Orion Pictures in Century City in the 1980s, and was always thrilled when celebrities dropped in to the offices.

In the 1990s, she was employed in the West Los Angeles offices of ASD Trade Shows. Though headquartered in LA, much of their business was based in Las Vegas and many employees headed out to the desert to help with set-up and managing the bigger shows. Elyse met her beloved Tom—a contractor working for an exhibitor—at one of these trade shows. They fell in love and Thomas Byrd immediately moved to LA to be with Elyse.

Though they ended their romantic relationship not too many years later, Tom was always beloved by Elyse. To say they remained friends for the rest of Tom’s life would not give their relationship justice. Sundays would find them at the Farmer’s Market in Hollywood, sitting at a table, trading sections of the Sunday paper over brunch. Tom was Elyse’s best friend, and when Tom became ill in 2006, Elyse astounded all who knew her with a previous unseen focus and determination in taking care of Tom, getting him to doctor’s appointments, and seeing to his needs until his passing in 2007.

Elyse was a fixture at West Los Angeles thrift stores throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. She loved nothing more than poking around in secondhand shops and seeing what treasures she could find.

She volunteered at the West LA branch of the Los Angeles Public Library—most often at quarterly book sales.

Her favorite movie: “West Side Story.” The original; she never saw—nor had any interest in seeing—the recent remake. Elyse watched the 1961 musical probably a hundred times; she would have loved to watch it a few hundred times more.

She was an incurable romantic. She loved roses, doves, hearts. Her home was decorated with such.

And she collected trolls. How she collected trolls. Literally thousands of trolls. She’d hoped to someday open a museum. She certainly had enough of them to do so.

Elyse loved puns, good or bad. She did the Los Angeles Times Sunday crossword puzzle in ink. (And she wrote a handful of crosswords for TV Guide.) Her name frequently popped up in the letters section of the LA Times, always commenting with some wry wordplay on a recent article she’d read.

She loved “Mutts” and “Get Fuzzy” and “Pearls Before Swine.” She clipped comics that made her laugh and she made you read them.

Elyse had a knack for writing humorous poetry. Her gift inspired her to change her last name to “Versé”—there was a poem that went along with it, which this writer has had recited to him numerous times over the years but sadly cannot bring to light now.

Elyse Versé was a big fan of Tom Jones and became friends with others who frequently attended his shows in the 1970s. Her friend Ana was someone she’d met this way and kept in touch with her for the next four decades until Ana passed away. Elyse even got to know some of Tom’s entourage, and was invited backstage on occasion—and she insisted Tom was always a gentleman. The Welsh singer was particularly delighted when Elyse presented him with a bulging scrapbook of clippings about him.

She loved heading down the 405 on day-trips to nearby Carson, California for a day of thrifting and IKEA. “We’re going to IKEA...” she would sing to the tune of an old Chef Boyardee jingle. She knew her favorite furniture items by their absurd Swedish-inspired names.

She recycled. She made sure plastic shopping bags were headed to a local cat rescue charity which used them. And when her building didn’t have a recycling bin outside, she’d save up her cans and bottles in her apartment and then listened for the telltale clatter of someone rooting through the Dumpster for recyclables, and rush out and give them her empties, cleaned and bagged.

(Elyse always capitalized Dumpster and impressed at least one of her friends that it was, at one time, a trademarked name.)

She loved animals. Elyse would sit on the grass outside ASD’s offices on her breaks and hand-feed “Princess,” a squirrel that trusted her enough to climb up on her knee and take peanuts from her.

West Los Angeles was her home for decades and Elyse managed her apartment building for a time. She was well-liked by her neighbors who in turn looked out for her.

In 2012, she moved to the Koreatown area of Los Angeles and decorated her apartment with the items she loved—quilts, mirrors, “shabby chic” items.  And trolls. She delighted in having friends drop by and she would spell out a custom welcome message on the mirror just inside her front door with Scrabble letter tiles so it was the first thing her visitor saw.

In her later years, Elyse was beset by health issues and was unable to find relief from pain. She was introduced to Twitter in 2020, created an account (as @realmissverse) and built up her followers. There was no such thing as a Twitter feud to Elyse. One would be hard-pressed to find an angry tweet in her timeline. All posts were either complimentary or punny—or simply gushing over the latest cute cat photo or video she’d seen. When she tweeted something political it was usually because there was an opportunity for some comedy.

The Twitterverse became her creative outlet ever after and as connections broke down for her in the real world—friends passed on, distances increased and circumstances changed—she found new friends online who she would never have the opportunity to meet in person yet who she valued enormously. The very existence of this network of Twitter friends gave her relief from the difficulties she faced and helped her navigate through increasingly difficult times.

Her Twitter avatar was a troll doll in a little white fleece onesie, which made it into her own personalized memes—photoshopped with technical ability that only increased as time went by.

“It’s important to me that people know I’m funny,” she’d often say, and not ironically.

She was funny, clever, somehow both exceedingly witty and groaningly corny, friendly, accepting, generous and, no matter what she was faced with, always ready to laugh or to make someone else laugh.

She was a friend, loyal and true, and she will be missed by all who were privileged to know her, both in person and online.

Elyse Versé — January 19, 1954 - February 27, 2024

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