JUICY DETAILS
The Inner Citrus made two demands. One: I must not inquire into their identities. They would not reveal those identities, and I would not pry. Two: I must partake in a shower orange. That much, at least, I had expected.
So one evening while my family watched TV downstairs, I brought a plump navel orange into the shower. It felt odd to have it in there with me, sort of like being trapped in a room with a strange, harmless animal. Eventually I began to peel the orange. Its skin was surprisingly tough. The zest caught under my fingernails; the juice and pulp leaked down my arms; the peel came off in small, irregular chunks. Conveniently— and this is perhaps the most persuasive argument voiced by fans of the shower orange—the water washed all the mess away. I made a little pile of peel chunks on a shelf in my shower. Then I ate the orange. It tasted like a standard supermarket orange, somewhere between fine and good. It smelled nice, but not noticeably nicer than an orange does outside of the shower. The shower felt like a 42
Inside Yale’s most illustrious secret society. BY ELI MENNERICK
shower: hot, pleasant. Perhaps the twin novelties of eating an orange in an unfamiliar place and performing an unfamiliar act in the shower made me more mindful of each element—that is, perhaps I enjoyed both the shower and the orange slightly more than I would have if I’d experienced them separately—but I wouldn’t call it liberating, or a sensual reverie, or a moment of spiritual transcendence. The members of the Yale Shower Orange Society would. YSOS is a secret group of shower orange enthusiasts who have vowed to “spread the zested message of the blessed shower orange,” as they assonantly describe their mission. I planned to interview their senior members—the “Inner Citrus,” as they call themselves—later that night. So I emerged from the shower, brought my orange debris to the trash, clothed myself, and opened the Zoom meeting. On the call was Kumquat, a lonely-looking orange with human eyes and a human mouth floating in front of an orange grove. Kumquat told me that others would soon arrive.
COLLAGE AND DESIGN BY ADA GRIFFIN
ENDNOTE
Soon, they did. Blood Orange, Jaffa Orange, Valencia Orange, Clementine, and Tangerine all joined Kumquat. Most of them had identical setups: the same digital orange-head in front of a digital orange grove. Blood Orange and Valencia Orange had phoned in together. Their camera was off, and in lieu of a profile picture their square displayed an edited version of Magritte’s “The Son of Man.” I’m sure you can guess what the green apple had been replaced with. The subreddit r/ShowerOrange was created in April 2015, but the trend didn’t blow up on Reddit until the next year. A shower orange, in case it isn’t clear yet, is nothing more than an orange you eat in the shower. Members of r/ ShowerOrange have described eating a shower orange as “borderline euphoric,” “a religious experience,” “amazingly blissful,” and generally transcendent. By the early months of 2017, publications like Men’s Health, Pure Wow, Vice, and even NPR had published online articles about the trend. (NPR’s testers concluded that eating a shower orange was nice, but “not T HE NEW JOUR NAL
