After having a look at Hugo Araújo’s artwork, a wise old friend provided an amazing quote from the great American humorist S.J. Perelman:
Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.
And I thought, “Damn, this is just too good to be true. My friend must have just made it up.”
I mean, ve‘s good enough to pull something like that off, if he has a will to.
But what you know? The citation is genuine.
Amazing! One of the greatest of all American comic writers (did I mention that he also co-wrote the book for One Touch of Venus, thus providing a link to another Faustus-favored creator?) had his own thaumatophile leanings (albeit, possibly only in jest).
Reality often disappoints, but sometimes it really satisfies.
[...] a wise old friend sent me a snippet of Perelman’s relevant to my own strange interests and I made merry with it over at my other Internet home. [As the old joke goes: "And then Merry went home." -- Bacchus] Digging into its provenance a [...]