[SQLObject] Unicode probs...

I"m getting a UnicodeDecodeError and I"m unsure how to fix it...
	/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/sqlobject/dbconnection.pyc in _insertSQL(self, table, names, values)
    	460         return ("INSERT INTO %s (%s) VALUES (%s)" %
    	461                 (table, ', '.join(names),
    --> 462                  ', '.join([self.sqlrepr(v) for v in values])))
    	463 
    	464     def transaction(self):

	UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 14: ordinal not in range(128)
I'm using sqlobject 1.2.1, mysqldb 1.2.3 and the tables in the database are formatted for unicode. The objects' columns in sql are UnicodeCol. The connection string for the database is 
	u'mysql://dbuser:@localhost/databasename?debug=1&logger=MyLogger&loglevel=debug&use_unicode=1&charset=utf8'
Not sure what else to try....

Thanks for any help.....
--marko