"Why Don't You... Cover a big cork bulletin board in bright pink felt banded with bamboo, and pin with colored thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms as your life varies from week to week?"

Wrote Diana Vreeland, quoted in "Diana Vreeland Asks, Why Don't You.... Diana Vreeland helmed the stylish pages of BAZAAR for 25 years. During that time she penned an advice column with extravagant ideas for the modern woman. We rounded up 12 of Vreeland's most outrageous and stylish suggestions. Check back every week for new audacious advice. So, why don't you..." 

Harper's Bazaar did that round-up in 2014, and Diana Vreeland worked there from 1936 until 1962 and then at Vogue from 1962 to 1971. I got sidetracked into the topic of Diana Vreeland after blogging about the Vogue editorship passing from Anna Wintour to Chloe Malle. As I noted in the comments section to that earlier post, I had a job in the early 1970s that required me to read Vogue (among many other magazines) ever month. I was intensely aware that there had been an earlier era that was so much wilder and crazier.

But the pink bulletin board with thumbtacks seems within anyone's reach. I assume "pin with colored thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms" means use colored thumb-tacks to pin up slips of paper upon which you've written words representing whatever you're currently feeling enthusiastic about.

The board and the tacks are so concrete, unlike "your various enthusiasms." And "your various enthusiasms as your life varies" seems to contain a careless repetition. But no matter. It's not for me to edit the editor, especially after so many years. 

"Why Don't You" sounds like the beginning of a nasty remark, like "Why don't you go jump in a lake?" or worse, but Vreeland used it to begin lists of inspiring prompts. Here's another: "Why Don't You... Have every room done up in every color green? This will take months, years, to collect, but it be delightful—a melange of plants, green glass, green porcelains, and furniture covered in sad greens, gay greens, clear, faded and poison greens?"

Makes me think of that Green Lady....

AND: I got into a rambling conversation with ChatGPT about Vreeland. Somewhere amidst all the chitchat I typed out this prompt: "It's surprising that someone so fanciful was running a magazine, managing people under her. Was she a figurehead from whom the staff was insulated or did people really try to follow her orders or did they have some genius for hearing her inspiration and making it happen in some synergistic way? It sounds terrifying (perhaps something like the way people working around President Trump feel... if he is what his haters imagine him to be)."