your problem, i pretend, is maybe that Class::MethodMaker is an astonishing (and absurd, imho) effort to import java-think into perl. that's why for perl it's an overhead, even base.pm looks like. as you can see in the documentation from base.pm, the similarity to

           package Baz;
           BEGIN {
               require Foo;
               require Bar;
               push @ISA, qw(Foo Bar);
           }
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is conceeded.
the thing with perl is, that everything is an agreement. every member of a class's instance is accessible directly - however, most people consider that unattractive... so:

my $object = MyClass->new;
print $object->name;
print $object->{'name'};
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are identical, provided in MyClass the 'name' method is defined. moreover, the second approach will always be a tick faster, as there is no need for dereferencing a method.
and if you really like your class to always have only one instance at the same time, try this:

package MyClass;
use strict;
use vars qw/$MUSTHAVEONLYONEINSTANCE/;
$MUSTHAVEONLYONEINSTANCE = 0;
...

sub new {
   return undef if $MUSTHAVEONLYONEINSTANCE;
   $MUSTHAVEONLYONEINSTANCE = 1;
   ...
}

sub DESTROY {
   $MUSTHAVEONLYONEINSTANCE = 0;
}
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unlike java, perl does'nt even try to protect you from yourself. ;)