You're Dead to Me - P.T. Barnum (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: September 9, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined by historian Prof Benjamin Reiss and comedian Desiree Burch in 19th-century America to meet the self-proclaimed showman, P.T. Barnum. He was a man famous for his museums and shows as well as "curiosities" such as General Tom Thumb, Bearded Ladies and The Fiji Mermaid. But look beyond Barnum’s infamous spin and you’ll find that contrary to his pop culture image this showman was far from the greatest.For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.Produced by Cornelius Mendez Script by Greg Jenner and Emma Nagouse Research by Charlotte PotterA production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I am a public historian, author and broadcaster. And on this podcast, we aim to amaze and astound you with a combination of comedy contortions and historical hilarity. And today we are donning our top hat and tails and running away to join the circus to explore the life of showman and hoaxer P.T. Barnum.

And to help us uncover the truth behind the humbugs. We're joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, he's the chair of the English department at Emory University in America, specialising in 19th century American literature, disability studies and health humanities. And he's the author of The Showman and the Slave, Race, Death and Memory in Barnum's America. It's Professor Benjamin Rees. Hi, Ben. Thank you for joining us. Hi, Greg. Thanks for having me. And in Comedy Corner, she's a playwright, actor, storyteller and hilarious stand-up comedian. You'll recognise her from all sorts of telly, including The Mash Report, QI, Live at the Apollo,

Taskmaster, Flinch and Too Hot to Handle. And of course, hopefully you remember her from our previous episodes of You're Dead to Me on Harriet Tubman and Josephine Baker. It's Desiree Birch. Welcome back, Desiree. Oh, it's so nice to be back. I feel like I'm super proficient at not knowing stuff about people from history because they keep coming back to the show. So last time out, Desiree, we had you on to talk about Harriet Tubman and Josephine Baker, two amazing women from American history. And today we are talking about, well, let's just say it's going to be more problematic. You're in American history now. Everywhere you look is a sea of problematic, mate. So let's go ahead and start with this guy because, I mean, I feel like he invented some of it almost,

like some of the problematic we know and love today, this guy started. So quite the ingenuous fella. Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head. We're certainly going to be touching on some pretty OG racism. So hooray for that. So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject. And you've heard of Barnum, haven't you? You've heard of Barnum and Bailey's Circus.

You will know about Barnum the entertainer the businessman the marketeer extraordinaire and in terms of pop culture well he would be thrilled to know that there's been many movies about him but let's address the elephant in the circus shall we the massive all-singing all-dancing Hollywood blockbuster The Greatest Showman with a hunky Hugh Jackman giving Barnum the woke jazz hands razzle dazzle he's a a business whiz. He's a family man. He's best pals to society's misfits and outcasts. He's a lovely fella. Hmm. Is it true? Let's find out, shall we? And what else do we need to know about the real greatest showman? Professor Ben, we're going to be talking about a man who did an astonishing amount of stuff,

incredibly busy, very industrious. One of the underlying philosophies of his entire career was the idea of the humbug. Can you just briefly give us an introduction to humbugging? That was really his word for hoaxes. He built much of his career on them, calling himself the Prince of Humbugs. This was a way to present his hoaxes and elaborate pranks as harmless fun. He thought that a good hoax or a humbug should be satisfying for all involved. And he argued that people can be played with as long as they still feel they have value for the money. That wasn't fraud. It wasn't injuring anybody. It was playing around with the idea of ripping somebody off. Let's have a quick rummage around in Barnum's youth.

By the age of 12, he's already trying to go to work, selling sweets to other kids. His dad dies when he's only 16 and leaves the family indebted. So does that mean that he's already trying to go to work, selling sweets to other kids. His dad dies when he's only 16 and leaves the family indebted. So does that mean that he's now responsible for trying to earn some quick cash? Yeah, I mean, he bounced around from job to job throughout his teens and into his early 20s. He was working in general stores. He worked in the book auctioning trade. And then by the age of 20, he set up a network of lotteries all over Connecticut. Age 19, at 1829, he marries a young lady called Charity Hallett. In the Greatest Showman movie, she's proper fancy. I don't get the sense in real life she was that classy.

Yeah, probably not much of a jump up in the class ladder. So they have a baby. Soon after, they eventually will have four daughters, Desiree, but the four daughters are spread apart over 16 years so he now decides to start his own newspaper called the Herald of Freedom which was critical of the militant Calvinism that he grew up in and it lands in hot water his own uncle who ran a rival newspaper sues him for libel and P.T. Barnum goes to jail for three months but Desiree how do you think he celebrates getting out of jail? Well, if the movie is any truth, he comes out, does a big song and dance, swings from a

lamppost and just invents from his own bootstraps an entire business. Is that it? It's pretty close to be honest. He throws a party in the very courtroom where he had been sent down. Yeah. And according to his own newspaper, I mean, completely fair and unbiased source, I'm sure, there were 1,500 attendees. There was a three-mile parade going back to his home with a cannon salute, musicians, 60 carriages, marshals carrying the flag, 40 people on horseback. It's unclear who organized it or whether it really happened to this extent, but Barnum suggested it was all spontaneous and he emerged as a hero of free speech and the free press. So already, as an incredibly young man, he's already showing the showmanship. If this story is true, Ben, we're seeing he enjoys spectacle, he enjoys showing off. But now it's

time for us to hit the klaxon that is marked the problematic button. Desiree, have you ever heard of Joyce Heth or Joyce Heath? She's probably one of the performers in his sideshow. She might be the first of many people to be commodified as an object to stare and gawk at and judge. You're absolutely right. And Ben, I know you're a specialist on this particular subject. Do you want to introduce us to the Joyce Heth or Heath story and why it's so grim? Yeah, well, it was before his circus days. And so she was a solo act. She was an enslaved, disabled black woman who Barnum exhibited in New York in 1835. He claimed that she was 161 years old, the oldest living human, and that she had been the nursemaid to George Washington.

Barnum technically rented her. He wasn't her enslaver, but he exploited a loophole in slavery laws in New York and Pennsylvania where slavery had already been outlawed to take hold of the lease agreement to exhibit her for a period of 12 months. So she was blind. She was paralyzed in one arm and both legs. She had arthritis in her hands. And Barnum exhibited her for 10 months, starting out in a room on Lower Broadway and then moving by carriage and train to dozens of cities and towns across the Northeast. And she was made to work in her old age up to 10 hours a day in dehumanizing conditions where she would have been watched and touched by people who

came to see her. So she was really treated as both a freak and as a venerated relic of history who told stories about bringing up dear little Georgie. She sang hymns to the audience that she'd supposedly taught him. Although Barnum would later deny it, in early autobiographical writing, he boasted about extracting her teeth to exaggerate her aged appearance. He also placed a notice in a Connecticut newspaper implying that Heth was not a human being at all, but that she was simply a curiously constructed automaton. So there was another example of him kind of spinning out the original joke or humbug into

new dimensions. And then at other times, in order to appeal to moral sensibilities, he spread word that the proceeds from the exhibit would go to abolitionist causes, including emancipating her great-grandchildren who are still held in slavery. And that was all, of course, bogus. When she dies, he makes money again by doing a public autopsy. Yeah. So he had the rights to exhibit her for 12 months, but she died before the end of that time. She died in February 1836. And he then arranged for a public autopsy to be performed ostensibly to verify her age and the plausibility of the story that she told about having raised George Washington.

And for the dissection, he rented out an amphitheater on Broadway and he sold 1,500 tickets to the public. The results were debated in the popular press for weeks, fueling the legend of Barnum as an unparalleled prankster and showman. That's really first how he comes before the public eye. So this is the basis of his fame. This is where he gets his first windfall of cash. He is then hit by what's known as the panic, which is basically the credit crisis of the 1830s. But he survives that. In 1841, he buys a museum called Scudder's American Museum and he renames it as Barnum's American Museum. And his modest ambition is to acquire at least one example of everything in existence.

He didn't want Noah's Ark. He just wanted half of the Ark. But his next big humbug, this is what's known as the mermaid hoax. His big thing is the Fiji mermaid in 1841, 1842. I'm assuming we're not going to be calling this a sort of aerial from the Little Mermaid style, you know, flowing red hair, are we? We're talking here about a sort of monstrosity, right? Yeah, yeah. It was the head and body of a monkey and the tail of a fish attached together sewn together which somehow made its way to new york 20 years later he's inherited a hoax here this has been going for 20 years how is that a hoax that's just horrible that's literally somebody took a monkey corpse and some big and sewed it together and whoever put it in the display

saw these big ass stitches and was like this this is totally cool. This will work. This is great. So that's the Fiji mermaid. And then we get in the same year to Charlie Stratton, who is known as General Tom Thumb. And I think he's in the movie. He is. Yes. This is a true story, isn't it? He met Charlie Stratton, who was an American child of very short stature. He was about 25 inches tall in 1842, and he hired him as a human oddity for his museum, he claimed he was 11 when he was in fact only four or five years old. Barnum pretended that Stratton was from England, and he concocted the persona of the English folktale Tom Thumb. Within a year, nearly half a million Americans had seen Charlie Stratton on tour and at the museum, and in 1844, Barnum took him on a tour of England.

And he gets to meet Queen Victoria herself and perform in front of her. She's not okay with it, really. She writes in her journal, One cannot help feeling very sorry for the poor little thing and wishing he could be properly cared for, for the people who show him off tease him a good deal, I should think. But Barnum is making big money off Charlie, isn't he? He's found a gimmick that he can tour.

And this is him raking in the cash. Sorry, I'm confused. So Charlie Stratton is a little person who's just also young or is not a little person and is just very young. He has congenital dwarfism. He is very small. And in middle age, he will be only a meter tall. So he is a little person. But as a child, he's a very small little person. In the movie, he was like 22 or something. And they were like, OK, fine. He just yanked a child out of his mom's house and was like, we're going on a tour of the world. Ha ha ha. You're a freak. And this kid's like, this is super healthy. Thanks.

kid's like this is super healthy thanks yeah that's about right while he's in england ben he tries to go a bit legit by buying william shakespeare's house this is him trying to import the house back to new york is that oh my god no he wants to send it back brick by brick to new york for his museum it's the most new money thing i've ever heard and then the house actually did go on auction desiree so you missed your chance and he almost bought it but he was outbid by the shakespeare association who could only afford it because charles dickens helped them fundraise wow yeah it could have been rebuilt in new york yeah but instead he had to nearly bankrupt charles dickens just to make a point so there we go that's an episode of homes under the hammer that i want to see

the charlie stratton tour ben makes him an awful lot of money. And he gets back home and he's got all this cash to splash. What is he splashing it on? Is he investing in property? Yeah, he builds his own mansion, a huge Orientalist mansion called Iranistan. And it's in the style of the Brighton Pavilion. He now tries to go legit again, Ben. And this is the time where in the

film, The Greatest Showman, we're seeing a weird love interest. But this is where he tries to recruit or rather manage the great celebrity of her age in Europe, the Swedish nightingale, Jenny Lind, who is an opera singer, very, very famous Desiree. And she is super expensive, Ben. Can he afford her? Not really. I mean, he got into a huge amount of debt trying to work with her. But when he did take her on tour, they both made a fortune. She was a sensational superstar in the US as well. And there were all sorts of celebrity tie-ins or clothes or dolls, souvenirs. Yeah.

I mean, there's merch. High end. So Jenny Lind, she's real. In the movie, she's a sort of homewrecker who fancies Barnum, presumably because he looks like Hugh Jackman, which is understandable. It's like, you look like Wolverine, so it's on. In The Greatest Showman, there's a bearded lady character who sings the song, This Is Me. But the bearded lady, is that from this period as well? Yeah, there were a number of bearded ladies in his employ over the years, but the most famous one was Josephine Clofuglia, who went by the stage name of Madame Clofuglia. And she was 24 when Barnum started exhibiting her in 1853. Most of the ladies weren't treated

particularly well, unlike in the movie, where all of the human oddities thank Barnum for allowing them to find family through performing in his show when their own families had shunned them or hid them behind closed doors. With Madame Clofulia, soon after she first appeared in Barnum's American Museum, a man called William Char publicly complained that she was another humbug. And the matter was taken to court, it was covered in detail in the press, including the New York Tribune, which was run by Barnum's close friend, Horace Greeley. the New York Tribune, which was run by Barnum's close friend, Horace Greeley. And Clofulia was then subjected to examinations to prove that she was a woman. So maybe there's some echoes of the Joyce Heth autopsy there. It's likely that Barnum had a hand in both Char's complaint and the

ensuing media coverage. That final line is the thing, Ben, is that he manufactured the complaint, presumably, to generate sensation. Yeah, no publicity is bad publicity. We haven't heard much about his wife and children, Ben. Where is Charity, his wife? Are they happily married? So I don't get the impression that they had a particularly happy marriage. One of their daughters had died in 1844 while Barnum was on tour, and he didn't then return from the tour for months. And when he finally did, of course, he decided to play a humbug on his wife, letting her believe that he was dead. And then she finally did, of course, he decided to play a humbug on his wife, letting her believe that he was dead. And then she found him waiting for her in the museum. Ha ha, big

surprise. We know Barnum did eventually stop drinking so much alcohol around 1851. Charity is reported to have cried with relief. This is a man with a somewhat unhealthy relationship with practical jokes. Where you're like, did your mom not hug you enough? Yeah. Barnum then publishes his first autobiography called The Life of P.T. Barnum, written by himself. And then almost immediately afterwards, he files for bankruptcy and loses his fancy Iranistan house. The public is very sympathetic. There's an open letter with a thousand signatures from American supporters.

Desiree, despite being in hardship, P.T. Barnum, as a kind-hearted man, he did still give a huge amount to charity. I don't know. He seems like the kind of person who gives to charity to be like, look, I'm super highbrow. See, I gave all these poor cripples money. See, I'm the good guy. And you're like, no, you're not actually. I'm actually pulling your leg a bit there because when I say he gave to charity, what I mean is he put his assets in his wife charity's name and then hid them from the taxman and then declared bankruptcy. So he was fine, but he lost the house. The house then burned down, as well as being a sort of problematic douche. He's also weirdly linked to a lot of arson.

It's the flames of hell nipping at his heels. It's trying to get him. There are deliberate attempts to destroy his exhibitions, his buildings. There are repeated fires later on, but there are definitely a couple of deliberate fires, aren't there, Ben? In 1864, Barnum's American Museum was victim to widespread arson attacks by Confederate sympathizers. But there were more fires in 1865, But there were more fires in 1865, 1868, and 1872. And one of the most disturbing aspects of the fires is the huge loss of life of the animals that he purchased.

He exhibited whales, kangaroos, tigers, snakes, all of whom died in the 1865 fire. But Barnum just bought more animals who then would usually die in the next fire. A whale should never die from fire. Like, you've done something profoundly wrong, like twice, apparently. And fittingly enough, a person of that quality then goes into politics, of course, Desiree. The obvious next step. So Desiree, this is what's known as the Battle of the Barnums. There's more than one of them. Is there a real more than one of them? Or did he make up a whole other Barnum that he could face off against that never existed?

So in 1867, a couple of years after the end of the Civil War, he ran for US Congress as a Republican against his Democrat cousin, William Barnum. And he ran on a platform of civil rights for formerly enslaved black people. P.T. Barnum did. And he referred to Joyce Heth and some of the other enslaved performers in his show saying, I had been a slaveholder myself. I probably should have been whipped for some of the things that I did. And while he really does seem to have turned against the politics of slavery, he was by no means rid of racism or for that matter, his penchant for turning people's disabilities

into a public spectacle. In the early 1860s, this is just before his political career, he exhibited a microcephalic black man, a man with a small head, named William Henry Johnson. And he dressed him up in a fake jungle suit with a spear and claimed to feed him only on a diet of raw meat and nuts. And the name of the exhibit is What Is It? Implying that he was neither a human being nor a monkey, but somewhere in between the two. And when he ran for Congress, he explained his support for black people's right to vote by saying that black men were naturally pious and submissive, so that white people had nothing to fear from them. It had only been a few years earlier that he exhibited a black man as something of a wild beast.

I'm curious as to how much of his circus, his show, outside of the animals, were people of color. Because basically, from the film, it looks like everyone's superpower is being brown. There's one incredibly pale person, and then everybody else is like the United Colors of Benetton. And then it's like Zac Efron and him like having a great time. Like that's what it looks like. He had large scale exhibits, supposedly showcasing different cultures

from around the world. And often people who are exhibited in them came under pretty dubious circumstances. So this is definitely a major theme in his career. I mean, the thing that we can't cover in this episode, Desiree, is the sheer number of things he did in his life, the industriousness, the extraordinary number of shows and exhibitions and things he was doing all the time. So this episode is the greatest hits or worst hits. One of the things that we need to talk about, of course, is the death of his wife, Charity, in 1873.

Desiree, how do you think he mourned for the mother of his four children? Probably played a prank on the three children who were still around and was like, here's your mom, and then did a weird weekend at Bernie's with her corpse. Is that close? It's a really good guess. I mean, he would have had to have shown up to do that, whereas he just didn't come home. Yeah, he was on a foreign tour and he didn't come back to the US when she died. But three months after the funeral, he did get remarried to a 23-year-old woman named Nancy Fish. He was 63 at the time.

He is an extraordinary figure in American history, and we do have to take him seriously. He is a figure with tremendous cultural heft and influence. Although we are cancelling him here with our jokes, there's a reason that we're talking about him. Yeah, he was arguably the most famous person in the United States in the 19th century and around the world, the most famous face of America for the world. And he really was brilliant in figuring out how to manipulate the media to extend the life of a local attraction beyond the specific place where it occurred is something that I think really fueled pop culture industry through the 20th and 21st century. Can you tell us a bit more about how he gets into circuses?

In 1870, although he had claimed he was about to retire, he went into business with other circus men and loaned his name to P.T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum Menagerie Caravan and Hippodrome. So he had the traveling stuff and then he had the permanent stuff in New York. And the Hippodrome in New York featured chariot racing, horse racing, and even elephant and ostrich racing. In 1872, he decided the circus should be toured by train to reach more audiences. And this was the first circus of a grand scale to travel in this way. His circus went through several iterations until he established Barnum's new and only greatest show on earth in 1877. But it's not until 1880, when he joined forces with James Bailey, that his reputation as a circus man was really cemented.

And then that brings us to one of his biggest stunts, or should we say jumbo size stunts in 1882. And it really annoys Queen Victoria, second time in the episode that she's been displeased. What does he do, Ben? He bought the beloved elephant Jumbo from Regent's Park Zoo to the dismay of Queen Victoria. There were public protests campaigning for Jumbo to stay in England, but Barnum shipped him over to New York. We're mad at him for buying this elephant, but why did the UK sell him? Apparently, he was getting kind of aggressive.

Barnum got him on a fire sale. Elephant as is, no questions to take. Jumbo is shipped across the ocean and arrives in New York. He's quite quickly put to use in a public safety campaign. This was a brand new landmark that had been built in New York in 1884 and the public did not trust it. They didn't think it was safe. And so Barnum stepped in with 21 elephants

to prove that it was safe enough to walk across. Do you want to guess what it is? Oh, is it one of the bridges, like Brooklyn Bridge or something? Brooklyn Bridge, yeah, absolutely. Oh, cool. I mean, you shouldn't do that stuff to elephants, but it's still cool to think about an elephant going across Brooklyn Bridge. But the following year, poor Jumbo is killed in another horrible accident.

Do you want to guess what it is, Desiree? Is it a massive fire? Not this time. This time it's a train crash, so it's a whole other type of horror show, I'm afraid. But don't worry, there's a raid because Jumbo can still perform as a stuffed Jumbo. Yeah, Barnum takes the corpse, taxidermies it. And actually Barnum then gifted his elephant Jumbo, taxidermied as it was, to Tufts University and it became their mascot and still is today.

I guess he couldn't give her back to Queen Victoria. Barnum at this point is 79 years old. He's approaching 80. Does he retire at this point? No, not really. At age 79, he takes the greatest show on earth to London. And the show at the Olympia Hall was seen by approximately two and a half million spectators in just three months.

Barnum's celebrity meant that he was a significant draw and it was advertised that he would attend every single performance. So he would arrive before the show in an open gilded carriage and lap the hippodrome track. During this tour, he met Oscar Wilde and William Gladstone, among many other famous people. He also donated an outfit for his very own wax figure in Madame Tussauds. But it does eventually catch up with him. He has lived this incredibly industrious life, extraordinarily busy man, but he does die in 1891. He's aged 80. We think a stroke and a heart attack, perhaps.

So Desiree, The Greatest Showman is a very successful movie. What is your opinion of the film, having seen it and then having listened to this podcast? The film itself, like, it's just one long music video and it's super grating because I keep wanting to get into the stories. It's got great actors in it. And then every time, apropos of nothing, they're like, I'm singing a pop song about it. And you're like, no, no, I'm out of it. But then you actually learn the real story and you're like, this is a gross miscarriage of justice. All of you guys need to stop right now.

Who wrote this? Who signed on? Did anybody bother to Google this guy before you said, yeah, I'll take this gig? The Nuance Window! Well, that brings us to the Nuance Window. Well, that brings us to the nuance window. This is where you and I grab our popcorn and we allow Ben to take two minutes to tell us something that we need to know about P.T. Barnum. Without much further ado, the nuance window, please. Well, in the 19th century, P.T. Barnum was one of the most famous people in the world. He was a man known for bringing joy and humour to the otherwise drab lives of customers high and low. He's America's fun uncle.

But there's another side to him, as we've been hearing. His first big success as a showman was staging a public autopsy of an elderly black woman who was held as his legal property while she performed for him. And as his exhibits grew bigger and more complicated, so did the displays of exotic, curious, and very often non-white performers who were generally presented as either backwards and simple-minded or ferocious and animalistic. His biggest multiracial exploitation extravaganza was called the Grand Ethnological Congress, which he ran in 1882, in which he secured the rights to exhibit groups of indigenous people from four different continents, often in very dubious circumstances. And yet now, only four years ago, along comes a popular film making

him out to be a champion of the dispossessed and the misunderstood. And there's a scene where all the circus performers, the bearded lady, Tom Thumb, two black aerialists, and the rest, thank him for giving them a sense of family and letting them be who they are. It's as if they're thanking Lady Gaga for singing Born This Way. The point isn't that Barnum wasn't brilliant at what he did, or that he didn't bring joy and laughter into people's lives. He certainly did all that. But I think that the laughter he unleashed was often the laughter of white supremacy, and the feeling that public spaces like Barnum's museum were built for white people. And they showed images of others in degrading circumstances that reflected white people's own superiority and power. Barnum was an extraordinary entertainer. He was a true innovator in creating public spectacles that bonded people together

through shared responses to his show and all the gossip and rumors that flowed from them. But he was also an innovator in racism. He was someone who developed new ways to make living in a racially stratified country feel like innocent fun and games for those who were on top. Wow. Thanks very much. Normally that window brings renewed humanity to the subject, as opposed to just like firmly entrenching them in time. Because he wasn't even an enslaver. He was like an enleaser. Because he was just like, I don't want to own anybody. That's going to tie me down. I'll make more money just changing hands all the time and flipping

people in and out and doing whatever I want with them. Thank you so much for teaching me more about American history, the things that I ran thousands of miles away from to forget. the things that I ran thousands of miles away from to forget. I'm afraid that is all we have time for today. So a huge thank you again to our guests in History Corner, the outstanding Professor Benjamin Rees from Emory University in America and in Comedy Corner, the delightful Desiree Birch. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we once again look into the circus of history,

two amazing high wire acts. But for now, I'm off to go and see if I can ship the Statue of Liberty over the ocean and rebuild it in my garden. Bye. Call Jonathan Pye. I want something better than that. What's wrong with Call Jonathan Pye? It's really boring. OK, so let's all do a brain fart. Actually, what about that? Jonathan Pye's brain fart.

It's hilarious. Jonathan Pye, off my chest. Off my chest? Chewing the fat, chewing the pie. Chewing the cud. Cud? The title for my new phone-in show is Jonathan Pye chews his own sick. I'm just spitballing. Let's just spitball. Jonathan Pye spits balls.

Shall we just stick with Call Jonathan Pye? Yes. Call Jonathan Pye. Listen first on BBC Sounds. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th.

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