Pycrypto RSA ciphertext to string back to ciphertext issue

[Jordan Apgar]

Hey all,
I'm trying to convert the encrypted data from RSA to a string for
sending over xmlrpc and then back to usable data.  Whenever I decrypt
I just get junk data.  Has anyone else tried doing this?  Here's some
example code:

from Crypto.PublicKey import RSA
from Crypto import Random

key = RSA.generate(384, Random.new().read)
l = str(key.encrypt("dog",""))
l = stringToTuple(l)
l = key.decrypt(tuple(l))
print l

string to tuple:
def stringToTuple(string):
    if string[0] + string[-1] == "()":
        items = string[1:-1]
        items = items.split(',')
        return items
    else:
        raise ValueError("Badly formatted string (missing brackets).")

thanks for any help, I've been messing with this for days and have
come up dry.