“If you have a Granny Smith, can I get a ‘woo’?” Jenny Mandl yelled into a megaphone. The crowd roared and pumped their fists in the air — forming a sea of apples above their heads. “If you have a Honeycrisp, can I get a ‘woo’?” Another cheer. “‘Boo’ for Red Delicious?” The group laughed and obliged with a prolonged boo.
It was a sticky August Saturday at Meridian Hill Park in Northwest Washington, and about 1,000 people — most, as far as I could tell, in their 20s and 30s — had gathered to collectively … eat apples.
Mandl, 29, and her boyfriend, Carl Endrulat, 30, had been planning this moment since June. Endrulat, a software engineer, is a few years into a quirky quest to document himself crunching on an apple in as many locations as possible, from the D.C. Cherry Blossom 5K to a lake in Ireland. Mandl, who is currently on a break from her career in tech, had the idea to invite strangers in on the fun. The duo created an open invite titled “eat an apple with me,” placed fliers all over the city, and convinced the event-planning app Partiful to promote the get-together on its “explore” page.
Mandl initially hoped 100 strangers might show up, but the invite wound its way through D.C.-themed subreddits and social media pages, and also caught the attention of Dan Silverman, who runs PoPville, a well-known website and Instagram account chronicling D.C. happenings. “Folks can really use some whimsy these days given how intense much of the international, national and local news has been lately,” Silverman told me via email.
Indeed, the more people I talked to, the more that word — whimsy — appeared to tell much of the story. And not just about this event’s bizarre popularity, but about what people, perhaps young people in particular, yearn for amid D.C.’s oh-so-serious culture.
A few days before the gathering, 22-year-old Veronica Botero told me unseriousness was the main appeal. “I love whimsy,” said Botero, who recently graduated from college and is now a tour guide on the National Mall. “Finding people who enjoy the same things has definitely been tough. So I thought it would be a cool way to get to know some people that also find fun in small items.” It was, she explained, a chance to experience “a little bit of joy in a very hectic world.”
On the street about an hour before the eating commenced, I met 30-year-old Conall Molloy. “The utter whimsy of the event drew me towards it,” he said. He had followed the instructions to bring two apples — one for himself, one for someone else — and ended up gifting his second apple (“Mission success!”) to a new friend: Mayowa Gbadamosi. “It just shows the community in D.C. and made me really happy I came out here,” Gbadamosi told me. “It’s way more people than I thought were going to come. I was not expecting this at all.”
“I don’t think anyone has ever been to an event like this before,” Cedric Paul, 29, who came to the park with his girlfriend, told me. “It’s the whimsy and the community. It’s a beautiful day and you want to be part of it.”
Plenty of young people in D.C. have an inner playfulness, said materials engineer Shannon Donaldson, 28, but “the whimsical nature of people doesn’t always get brought out day-to-day. The opportunity to be able to experience that, I think that’s what drew a lot of people in.”
“D.C. can sometimes be a relatively serious city, but I think there are silly billies,” Mandl told me. “This event is an opportunity for the sillier crowd to connect over something super unserious. I would like to bring more of that to D.C. because those people exist.”
Mandl previously spent years as a program manager at Microsoft. “I was taking myself so seriously. I was like, ‘I have to show people that I’m smart. I have to show people I can do big things.’” But the grind took a toll. She eventually decided she would rather face the consequences of quitting than continue doing the job another day. She moved to D.C. in October 2025 to be closer to family and met Endrulat two months later. The apple meet-up, to her, is the ultimate symbol that she’s fully comfortable in her own whimsy: “I’m getting so much more joy from planning this silly little event than I ever got from reaching career milestones at a very high level.”
D.C., of course, is a place where people often have an agenda — grand plans, concealed strategies, designs on influence. But for Mandl, the agendalessness of the concept was key. “There’s no ulterior motive. We’re not selling something. We’re not trying to get social media traction for any business or product,” she told me. “If everyone just brings two apples … and meets someone new that’s a huge win in my book. I think that’s the difference between a performative versus a community-driven event: Do you want something from the people who are coming? And we don’t.”
“I like it even better as a result of that,” 24-year-old medical student Ashley Huang told me the day before the event. “They’re not gonna promote their brand of apple juice or something.”
In a city known for its young strivers and career-ladder-climbers, their approach was a dramatic statement unto itself. “This is more of a silliness in spite of the city, as opposed to a silliness because of the city,” Endrulat told me. “I kind of get annoyed with how stuffy some places are. Maybe other people feel similarly. Maybe even stronger than me.”
Anusha Mathur is an assistant editor at NOTUS Perspectives.
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