Many, many thanks to arturo for his patience in helping me figure this out

I had to create to query objects. Not knowing OO, I don't quite understand what's going on here but it works. Here is the code that works:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use CGI qw(:html3);
open ('QUERY', '<query.txt') || die "Cannot open: $!";
my $q = new CGI ('QUERY');
my $p = new CGI;
close QUERY;
BEGIN {
    use CGI::Carp qw(carpout fatalsToBrowser);
    open (LOG, ">errorlog.txt") or
        die ("Unable to open errorlog.txt: $!\n");
    carpout(\*LOG);
}

print $q->header();
print $q->start_html();
   print $q->startform("post",'eventform.cgi');
   print $p->textfield(-name=>'field_name',
                        -size=>50,
                        -maxlength=>80);
   print $q->submit(-name=>'button_name',
                -value=>'value');
   print $q->endform;
print $q->end_html();
open (QUERY, '>query.txt') || die "Cannot open: $!";
$p->save('QUERY');
close QUERY;
[download]

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar";
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;