Carl Endrulat is a Pink Lady type of guy. The first time he ate one was euphoric.
“It was just the juiciest apple I have ever eaten,” he said. “Every time I eat a Pink Lady now, I have a memory of that high.”
On Saturday afternoon, Endrulat’s love of apples reached a new high when about 1,000 people gathered at Meridian Hill Park in Northwest Washington to eat an apple together. Endrulat organized the “Eat an Apple With Me” event with his girlfriend, Jenny Mandl.
For more than a century, scholars have opined on the symbolism of apples in literature and mythology and art. But sometimes an apple is just an apple.
There’s no deep or hidden meaning in the event, Endrulat said. The wackiness is the point. “It’s really an exercise in silly joy,” said Endrulat, who works as a software engineer for a Defense Department contractor.
Bringing people together was the goal, too, Mandl said. “People yearn for community,” she said. “It doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to be substantial. We can just get together and be dumb.”
At the park, which is also known as Malcolm X Park, the cascading fountain was flowing, and hundreds of people were bustling around. Temperatures were high. Spirits were higher. Apples were everywhere.
Red Bull brand ambassadors were on site, passing out free white peach energy drinks. “Gotta support the whimsy,” Bryce Waweru said as he hawked cans.
Nearby, Rose Dallimore, 26, and her friends wore red papier-mâché apple hats that Dallimore’s mom had made for them.
“It’s an awesome way to bring people together for something that isn’t super high stakes, which is needed in D.C.,” Dallimore said.
Jack Wilson, 38, came with his two kids, 4-year-old Wilhelmina and 7-year-old Thomas. Wilson said his son asked him why they were eating apples in the park.
“And the answer was because it’s silly, and it had been a while since we’d done anything silly,” Wilson said.
Madison Gee came with a few friends for what she called her “impromptu bachelorette party.” The D.C. Tutoring and Mentorship Initiative took advantage of the crowd to sign up volunteers.
Endrulat and Mandl’s friends were there to support, too. “Who doesn’t love an apple?” said one of them, Rachel Wells. She wielded a bag of Honeycrisps. “I also hate doctors, obviously,” she added.
Not everyone brought apples. Patrick Murphy toted a nectarine because the farmers market he went to that morning was sold out of apples. “From a distance, it looks like an apple,” he said. Someone else brought an apple pie.
When Endrulat and Mandl first posted the event on Partiful in June, Endrulat didn’t think more than 20 or 30 people would come. But then Mandl reached out to several Partiful employees on LinkedIn. One responded and put the event on the app’s discover page. “Then it started blowing up,” Mandl said.
The event grew so popular that Endrulat and Mandl had to get a permit from the National Park Service. On Wednesday, the couple met with representatives from D.C. police and the park service to go over final details.
The duo was inspired by a 2025 event in New York, where a man invited people to smoke a cigarette with him, and hundreds showed up. But Endrulat said eating apples isn’t the D.C. version of smoking cigarettes; it’s just the Endrulat version.
“D.C. is a little bit more of a serious city than New York City is. I definitely would want to bring more silly to D.C.,” Mandl said.
At first, Endrulat and Mandl were planning to provide apples to the attendees. Mandl had visions of her car overflowing with the fruit. But they said the National Park Service told them that public health concerns meant they couldn’t offer any fruit that people eat the skin of. Oranges and bananas were okay, the park service said, but Endrulat worried that would have messed up the theme.
So they pivoted to making the event BYOA: Bring Your Own Apple.
Why apples? Why not.
“I like apples. Apples are good. I enjoy them probably more than the average person,” said Endrulat, who has a tattoo of an apple tree on his thigh. “I assume I’ve been eating apples since I was a kid,” he added, but his apple intake has increased in recent years. Now, he eats up to around a dozen apples per week.
The fruit is also a comedy bit for Endrulat: His Instagram is filled with pictures of him eating apples in front of sites like the Charging Bull in New York’s financial district and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There’s also one of him eating an apple while running a race.
“It’s really funny to me to have a photo of some notable thing behind me while I’m eating an apple,” Endrulat said.
At 2 p.m., a collective crunch filled the park as hundreds of people took a bite of their apples at the same time. Juice dripped down their chins, and Endrulat took a selfie. In one corner of the park, someone was playing Charli XCX’s song “Apple.”
A few minutes later, Mandl announced they were hosting an after-party at the nearby LGBTQ+ bar Crush. As people flocked to cocktails, one lady walked around with a bag collecting apple cores.
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