The character of Jerri is based on motivational speaker
Florrie Fisher, who travelled high schools in the 1970s talking about her fall from 1940s socialite to a heroin addicted prostitute in the 1960s. Many lines of dialogue in the show are taken verbatim from a recording of a speech she gave to a New York high school, which circulated for many years on the cult video market as "The Trip Back". In real life, Fisher fell out of the public eye in the early 1970s, and for many years was believed to be missing and presumed dead. In the late 2000s, researchers turned up an interview with Mike Douglas in a 1973 issue of the Rotary Club publication "The Rotarian", in which Douglas recounted interviewing Fisher. According to Douglas, Fisher's disappearance was due to her being taken to a Miami hospital in the middle of her lecture tour, where she was diagnosed with liver cancer. The disease resulted in kidney failure, and she ultimately died of a heart attack on May 26, 1972 at the age of fifty-four.
