Every semester I walk into my entertainment PR class, a room full of college students, and teach them how to protect a client’s reputation. We spend ample time on crisis management, including the golden hour, that first window after disaster hits when you can still get ahead of the story before it gets ahead of you. Because a crisis rarely ruins a reputation on its own. The response does the damage.
We study the celebrity who handled a scandal like a pro and the one who went on Instagram Live at 2 a.m. and made everything worse. My students take notes, convinced this only happens to a pop star with a bad publicist.
Oh, honey, if they only knew.
A crisis when you’re over 55 is waking up one morning and discovering your shoulder no longer goes above your ear, and nobody can tell you why. A crisis is a man at the Target drive-up pickup not asking for the required ID for the six bottles of wine you bought. A crisis is standing in the Manolo Blahnik store in New York trying on a gorgeous pair of stilettos and taking a near-fatal nosedive into a full-length mirror.
I was grading my students’ midterm crisis case studies with wine within reach when it hit me: nobody ever wrote a crisis plan for us. Women over 55 get no briefing book or talking points. We’re given no media training for the moment our bodies, our brains, and our birth certificates all go rogue at once. We get all kinds of advice about face creams, concealer, and Botox, but none about what actually happens.
So I did what any good PR professional would do. I wrote the crisis plan myself.
Crisis Playbook
1. The Crisis: No more fucks to give.
Nearly every woman I know says this around 55, but it took me much longer. The first time I said it out loud was with friends after three shots of tequila.
For years I kept a few fucks tucked away in my drawer, just in case. I’d rewrite an email six times, so I didn’t sound like “too much.” I’d go to an event I had no interest in to show I cared. I’d let certain people’s snide comments slide when I should have slid one right back. I’d waste good energy trying to change the mind of someone who had already decided exactly who I was, as if one more conversation would get them to reverse the verdict.
Then came this last ungodly birthday. My best friend and I went to dinner wearing matching sashes that said NO MORE FUCKS TO GIVE. Nobody asked us to take them off, and if they had, we would have used the F word differently.
The drawer is empty now. I took all the fucks out and looked in the back to be sure.
Holding statement: “Thank you so much for your input. I’ll take it under consideration.” (I won’t.)
The plan: Stop explaining yourself. Leave the party when you’re done, and don’t make up some lame excuse for why you have to go. Be authentic: “I’m too tired, and I want to go home and snuggle in bed with my husband and my cat Frankie.”
2. The Crisis: Bungee exercise class is not a good idea.
For that same birthday, my best friend and I decided to take a bungee-jumping exercise class. We thought it would be fun, and we were sure it would be easy because we took dance classes in high school and our minds were still stuck there.
It wasn’t easy. The second I left the platform I started spinning like a load of laundry on the spin cycle, and I got so dizzy I had to yell for help while hanging upside down by my stomach. Nobody wants to hear themselves scream “help” on their birthday.
So I decided never to take part in anything that looks like fun on Instagram and leaves me limping for two months.
Risk assessment: Reputation harm, moderate, depending on who filmed it. Orthopedic damage, likely. Dignity, gone the minute I yelled for help.
The plan: The next time someone suggests something like this, decline with grace. Be the woman on the ground with a glass of wine and a good view.
3. The Crisis: Frozen shoulder. WTF is this?
Three months ago I lifted my suitcase onto a luggage rack in New York and spent the rest of the trip with an ice pack the size of a king-size comforter on my shoulder. When I got home, the MRI results were in: adhesive capsulitis, aka frozen shoulder.
My doctor said it’s common in women my age. My shoulder has given up. I can’t raise my left hand in protest, or reach for a glass on the top shelf, and if I grab my phone off the nightstand at night, I scream so loud I scare my husband and Frankie.
It hurts worse than the time my then-two-year-old daughter, Summer, took a piece out of my cornea with her razor-sharp toddler fingernail. I’d rather hike across a glacier in Alaska than spend another day with this fucking frozen shoulder. I’ve found new ways to put on a bra that would get me hired by Cirque du Soleil. When that failed due to the pain it caused, I ordered myself several sexy, lace, front-clasping bras because why not? I’m frozen, not frigid.
Holding statement: “We’re aware of the situation and are actively working toward a resolution.” This is also what I tell my husband every time he asks if it’s any better.
The plan: Pilates with an instructor my age, part healer and part cheerleader. She’s seen all kinds of women with this, and most of them are over 55. Ice, movement, and patience, which I’m terrible at.
4. The Crisis: Retirement.
My husband and I have refused to retire because we’ve seen what it does to most people: regret, a sense that they no longer matter, or an early funeral.
He’s a gastroenterologist, and he tried retirement once. Within a few months, he turned into a blob, staring into space and doing colonoscopies in his sleep. Now he works part-time, teaches medical students, and is himself again.
As for me, I’m ten years younger than him, and I’ll probably die in the middle of a lecture. My students will get one last case study, live and in person.
Holding statement: “Ask me again in ten years.”
The plan: Keep working as long as it makes us happy. Cut back when we want to, and not because a birthday says so. Keep teaching, because nothing keeps you sharp like a room full of 21-year-olds. If I do go mid-lecture, somebody please grade my finals.
5. The Crisis: Saying my real age out loud.
I can think it and I can write it on a form at the doctor’s office, but saying it out loud to an actual human being is another story. I still choke on it, after lots of practice.
I teach PR, so I’m good at helping students develop a narrative and coaching a celebrity through a press conference, but telling the person who does my eyebrows my age? Never. If anyone pushes, I tell them I’m around the same age as Madonna.
Media training note: The audience can smell hesitation. If you flinch, they think there’s a story, so don’t flinch. Just don’t give them the real number either. A good publicist never releases information the client doesn’t want out there.
Holding statement: “69 and fine.” (I’ve been 69 and fine for well over a year now.)
The plan: Go back to the tagline that has always served me well. Stay on message and control the narrative.
6. The Crisis: Giving up the Manolos for boots.
This one came up after a night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. I wore my Mary Jane Manolos, and by the final curtain, my heels and toes were bleeding. I hobbled out to the taxi like I’d been the one cast in a tragic role.
My sister suggested Birkenstocks, or something made by Aerosoles. Over my dead, broken body. But who am I kidding? The Manolos are going on an intentional pause.
Revised messaging: We are not retiring the brand; we are expanding the product line.
The plan: Look cool in combat boots, or in my favorite Prada Chelsea boots. Boots for cobblestones, staircases, and anything more than a block of walking. The Manolos stay in the closet where I can see them, waiting for a night when I’ll mostly be seated.
7. The Crisis: Flying coach.
I’m a nervous flyer on a good day, and for me, a good day means a wide, reclining seat and champagne served in a real glass before we hit 10,000 feet.
I’d take a second job before I sit in 34B again with a stranger’s elbow in my ribs and a toddler using my lower back as a drum kit. I’d teach an extra class or advise a print newspaper again if it meant never flying coach.
Budget reallocation: I’ve moved first class from the luxury column to crisis prevention. The extra legroom and free champagne are the only thing standing between me and a viral video titled “Woman Loses It on Flight to Newark.”
The plan: Keep the three Platinum Amex cards in my wallet for the airport lounge access and the first-class upgrades. If the upgrade doesn’t come through, fork over a month’s mortgage payment for the seat if I have to.
8. The Crisis: Worrying about death.
It all started at 55. I’ve always feared death, but not like this. Out of nowhere, it became real and I started worrying about which songs would be played at my service. I made sure my husband understood the New York death plan, followed by my ashes scattered in the ocean off Malibu while Joni Mitchell’s “California” plays.
Since then, I wake up at 3 a.m. every morning writing my own obituary. I worry about who will read it and whether they’ll use the good picture of me, the edited one, not the candid my family will inevitably choose, where I look like I just smelled something.
Key message: Yes, it’s coming, and no, I don’t need nightly meetings with it.
The plan: Update the will and put in writing who gets my diamond ring and my 40 pairs of Manolos. Tell the people I love that I love them, and pick the good picture for the service and prayer cards myself. Then close the file.
9. The Crisis: Selling the house and downsizing.
My husband and I live in the suburbs. We moved there because he had to be within 20 minutes of the hospitals where he worked. That chapter is over, and we’re ready for the next one. We want a condo or apartment in a city where we can walk everywhere.
And why the hell not? We don’t need a four-bedroom, three-bath house with a swimming pool we never use. We don’t need closets full of things I haven’t touched since the glam rock days on the Sunset Strip (but I’m keeping my glitter jeans, my 40 pairs of Manolos, and my stacks of backstage passes).
Public perception: Our friends think we’ve lost our minds, trading a peaceful suburb for sirens and helicopters overhead. We prefer to call it a bold repositioning.
The plan: Keep what we love and get rid of everything we no longer need. Then take the money, pick a neighborhood, and walk to dinner. Put what’s left toward first-class tickets. (See item 7.)
10. The Crisis: “Ma’am,” and “You look young for your age.”
Being called “ma’am” by a man who looks young enough to be one of my students is bad enough, but the compliment with a footnote is worse. “You look young for your age.” I hate it. Just tell me I look young, or keep your mouth shut.
Holding statement: A smile that says “thank you” and also “watch yourself, buddy.”
The plan: Accept the “ma’am” gracefully and tip the same as I would have anyway, because I’m classy. As for the compliment, here’s some free media training. Stop the sentence at “young.” The best publicists know when to stop talking.
11. The Crisis: That one hair and the hair down there.
Other women get a stray chin hair. I’m Italian. I get a mustache I used to wax.
Now the mustache has turned into one inch-long hair that shows up overnight. I’d swear on a stack of saints it wasn’t there yesterday, and yet there it is in broad daylight, staring back at me in my car visor mirror. It came over on the boat with the all-day sauce recipe and the guilt, and it has no plans to leave.
Monitoring strategy: Tweezers in the car, where the light is brutal and honest. A magnifying mirror and my best friend on contract to tell me immediately, no matter where we are or who’s watching. She’s my rapid-response team.
Speaking of hair, I’m not sure where it goes. Apparently it leaves one place and moves to my upper lip. My hair down there is looking a little sparse, and I need my reading glasses to see clearly. I’m color blind, so I can’t tell if there’s any gray, so I do my own grooming to be safe. My best friend taught me how years ago, but lately her method of one leg on the bathtub ledge, razor in hand, has become a potential 911 call.
Risk assessment: Physical danger, great. Reputation harm, catastrophic.
The plan: Give up self-grooming and find someone to wax, preferably a woman my age, because no judgment needed.
12. The Crisis: Letting go.
Giving up the Manolos was hard. Letting go of the baggage I’ve been dragging around for decades is harder.
A relative who wronged our entire family for no reason anyone can explain. A former marriage I should have left years earlier, and still regret. A college journalism degree I wish I’d earned sooner, before a rock star sued me. The list goes on.
I’ve replayed it all on a loop at 3 a.m. It’s like a Hallmark movie: I know exactly where it’s going, just without the happy ending.
Document retention policy: Anything past its expiration date gets shredded. That includes grudges and the endless analysis of why.
Holding statement: “That was then.”
The plan: You can’t change the past, so live in the present, and don’t worry about the future, because it isn’t promised. When I catch myself working on a new theory about why, I’ll sing the song from Frozen (like my shoulder) over and over until it sinks in. Let it go, let it go.
13. The Crisis: The 3 a.m. wake-up.
I’ve never been a good sleeper. Thanks to the nuns who taught me to pray “If I should die before I wake,” I spent my childhood afraid to close my eyes. But now it’s gone to a whole new level. I wake up at 3 a.m. for no reason. Everything hurts, and rolling over could crack a rib. My brain wants to play a highlight reel of every dumb thing I’ve said since 1984.
Holding statement: “I’m not tired, I’m just reflecting.”
The plan: Treat it like the overnight news cycle. Nothing gets decided at 3 a.m. No emails, no texts, and absolutely no online shopping, especially for anything with “anti-aging” in the name. And NyQuil isn’t just cold medicine anymore; it’s my best friend.
14. The Crisis: Forgetfulness.
I sometimes walk into a room and stand there like I’ve been dropped off by a spaceship. I know I came in here for something, but I have no idea what.
I know the actor, and I can describe the movie, the lines he said, and every woman under 25 he’s ever dated. I know his name as well as my own. I can even hear the soundtrack in my head, yet in that instant, his name is nowhere.
Holding statement: “It’s right on the tip of my tongue.” (It’s not.)
The plan: Thank God for Google. Google is my memory now. ‘Actor, movie with a boat, only dates women under 25.’ Leonardo DiCaprio. Of course.
15. The Crisis: Menopause. Never heard of it.
Every woman my age has a menopause story. The hot flashes, the night sweats, and the week she cried at a car commercial, then threw the remote at her husband.
I do’t have one. Not one symptom, or a single hot flash.
How did I manage this? I warded it off. The word menopause was not allowed in my presence, not at dinner, not in our home, not in a text message. If a friend started a sentence with “When I was going through menopause,” I got up to refill my wine before she finished the word. I may also have lit a candle to a saint or two.
Crisis strategy: Deny it. Every PR person knows a story you don’t feed eventually dies. I applied the same principle to my hormones.
Holding statement: “No comment.”
The plan: Never say its name or Google it. And if anyone offers you a handheld fan, walk away. That’s how it locates you. Will this work for you? I have no idea, but it worked for me, and I’m not taking questions.
The After-Action Review
In crisis management, once the dust settles, you do what we call an after-action review. What happened, what worked, and what we’d do differently next time. I make my students write one for every case study.
So here’s mine.
Almost none of these are actual crises; they’re the things nobody warned us about. The things our mothers didn’t talk about, or that our doctors rushed past. As for the media, they just tried to sell us a $75 cream and a promise that 60 is the new 40.
The real crisis is pretending none of it is happening: ignoring the frozen shoulder, lying about the number (still working on that one), keeping a few fucks in the drawer just in case, wearing the Manolos until your feet bleed because you think that’s what a woman who still has it is supposed to do.
So here’s my official statement: I’m over 55 (a bit of an understatement, but technically true). My shoulder doesn’t work, I can’t find my reading glasses, I’m selling the house, I’m keeping the shoes, and I’m flying first class. Think of it as a rebrand. Same woman, fewer illusions. If Madonna can reinvent herself a million times, so can we.
Thank you, everyone. That concludes today’s press conference—no further questions.