Personally, I would say learning smalltalk was very valuable, though it is quite hard. When I did so, I was programming C at work and smalltalk at home in the evenings, and that made it doubly bad IMO. Switching between purely procedural and purely OO I found to be very difficult. Then I landed a job doing smalltalk full-time for a short time, and it got much easier.

That said, if your daily lot requires scripting more than complex (gui) applications, you might consider looking at Ruby. It gives you much of what you have with perl, but from an (almost?) pure OO perspective.