Word: passepartout
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...Days is only good. It is a six-part slight exaggeration about Perelman's 1971 trip along the route taken by Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg. (Fifteen years ago, Perelman wrote the film script for the Mike Todd spectacular.) Perelman's traveling companion was not Passepartout but a 6-ft. 1-in. "toothsome cupcake" named Sally-Lou Claypool. Aboard H.M.S. Choleria, 19th century British sang-froid bunks amiably with the 20th century cynicism of a hornswoggled American tourist...
...world in 80 days. No more, no less. Fogg, said Verne, employed "steamers, railways, carriages, yachts, merchant vessels, sledges, elephants." As far as possible, 66-year-old Circumnavigator Perelman will confine himself to such modes in following Fogg's itinerary. In place of Fogg's famed manservant, Passepartout, Perelman prefers female traveling companionship. Though he has had "five applications for the post from various birds," he says, "I have in fact chosen my secretary." No bet, though. The payoff, like Author Verne's, will be a book...
...canned rations (one rumor has suggested that food in the hostelries where delegates are staying would be garnished with ground glass), ham radio (no phone service), walkie-talkie (if radio fails), chrysanthemums (for flower power if cornered by militant hippies), first-aid kit, gross of aspirin, and finally, a passepartout, collectively endorsed by A.D.A., Y.I.P., the Geneva Conference, Mayor Daley, the Black Panthers and Interpol, certifying that the bearer is an accredited seeker of peace, racial harmony, revolution, law and order and legalized...
This pattern may spread, may well be the shape of domestic service in an industrial democracy. And so, alas, exeunt Jeeves, Passepartout and Pseudolus, to become IBM cards in the files of an impersonal Mary Poppins, Inc. No "existentialist bond" perhaps, no love lost, no mutual dependence. But at least-and at best-a new, professional sense of service and a more civilized life...
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