lady voice) "all our husbands have moved on, and we were tired of the garden club and the bridge club and the ladies club. So Mary Frances and Julia and I all went back to medical school." Irwin loosely based the character of Marguerite on his mother ("unabashed and delightfully inappropriate") and his maternal grandmother ("a genteel, bun-haired lady of means"). As Irwin explains, "I was raised by Southern women so I imitate a lot of them. Marguerite is the voice of my grandmother, who was born in 1894, and the attitude of my mother. And anything that I want to gripe about I put into [Marguerite's] voice and nobody feels bad about me." Two other recurring characters in Irwin's stories, Johnny and his brother Kenny, are actual people whom he knew as a child. When the all-white elementary school that Irwin attended in the 1960s was forced to integrate, he became classmates with Johnny Norrington, an African American. They became good friends despite lingering racial barriers. In his story "The Rudiments" on Banana Seat, Irwin describes an accident he caused while riding his bike on a visit to the Norringtons' all-black neighborhood. Genuinely afraid of retaliation, Irwin was whisked to safety by the boys' mother. On the album Bootsie in Season, Irwin recalls how he and Johnny managed to watch the movie Dr. Terror's House of Horrors together despite Johnny having to sit in the "colored section" in the balcony while Irwin watched from the level below. Discography Banana Seat (1995) Christmas at Southern White Old Lady Hospital (2004) Book Every Saturday for a Funeral (2006) Bootsie in Season (2007) Crowd Control (2008) Lip Service (2010) Risk Assessment (2011) Sister True (2013) Andy's Wild Amphibian Show! (2015) Squeaky on the Roof (2017) Love and Armadillo Migration (2017) Flaked, Puffed, Shredded, & Clustered (2018) Perpetual Calendar (2019) References External links Andy Offutt Irwin's official website American male singer-songwriters American children's musicians Guitarists from Georgia (U.S. state) Living people 1957 births American storytellers American humorists American male guitarists 20th-century American guitarists 20th-century American male musicians Singer-songwriters from Georgia (U.S. state)