¿Cómo instalo MySQLdb en mi MacBook o hay alguna forma de omitir la instalación y usar sqlalchemy sin ella?

Tengo macOS Sierra y XAMPP instalados (con mariadb como base de datos).

Sin embargo, en mi MacBook local, estoy ejecutando este código de Python para crear una tabla:

 from sqlalchemy import create_engine

def create_db():
    from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker
    engine = create_engine("mysql://username:password@localhost/exchange_rate", echo = True)
    # Session = sessionmaker(bind = engine)
    # session = Session()
    # import pdb
    # pdb.set_trace()
    meta = MetaData()
    exchange_rate = Table(
        'inr_exchange_rate', meta, 
        Column('id', Integer, primary_key = True), 
        Column('as_of', Date), 
        Column('rate_per_usd', Float), 
        Column('last_modified', DateTime),
        )
    meta.create_all(engine)
    return True


if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = get_parser()
    args = parser.parse_args()
    print(args)
    if args.create_db:
        print("Create db called;")
        create_db()
        exit(0)
 

pero me sale este error

 Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "exchange_rate.py", line 73, in <module>
    create_db()
  File "exchange_rate.py", line 50, in create_db
    engine = create_engine("mysql://username:password@localhost/exchange_rate", echo = True)
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/sqlalchemy/engine/__init__.py", line 386, in create_engine
    return strategy.create(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/sqlalchemy/engine/strategies.py", line 75, in create
    dbapi = dialect_cls.dbapi(**dbapi_args)
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/sqlalchemy/dialects/mysql/mysqldb.py", line 92, in dbapi
    return __import__('MySQLdb')
ImportError: No module named MySQLdb
 

Luego intenté seguir las instrucciones en el enlace dado por @bmike:

 $ sudo pip3 install MySQL-python
Collecting MySQL-python
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/a5/e9/51b544da85a36a68debe7a7091f068d802fc515a3a202652828c73453cad/MySQL-python-1.2.5.zip (108kB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 112kB 490kB/s 
    ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
     command: /usr/local/opt/python/bin/python3.7 -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/private/tmp/pip-install-oxqg62fi/MySQL-python/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/private/tmp/pip-install-oxqg62fi/MySQL-python/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' egg_info --egg-base pip-egg-info
         cwd: /private/tmp/pip-install-oxqg62fi/MySQL-python/
    Complete output (7 lines):
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/private/tmp/pip-install-oxqg62fi/MySQL-python/setup.py", line 13, in <module>
        from setup_posix import get_config
      File "/private/tmp/pip-install-oxqg62fi/MySQL-python/setup_posix.py", line 2, in <module>
        from ConfigParser import SafeConfigParser
    ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'ConfigParser'
    ----------------------------------------
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: python setup.py egg_info Check the logs for full command output.
 

pero si intento instalar el analizador de configuración, aparece el mensaje ya instalado.

 $ pip3 install ConfigParser
Requirement already satisfied: ConfigParser in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages (4.0.2)