I seem to be unable to use :order_by for more than one column at a time. 
For example, I have a "Show" model with date and attending columns.
If I run the following code:
@shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date")
I get the following results:
[#<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>, 
 #<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>, 
 #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>, 
 #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>,
 #<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>]
If I run the following code: 
@shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "attending DESC")
[#<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>,
 #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>,
 #<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>,
 #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>,
 #<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>]
But, if I run:
@shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date, attending DESC")
OR 
@shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date, attending ASC")
OR 
@shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date ASC, attending DESC")
I get the same results as only sorting by date:
 [#<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>, 
 #<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>, 
 #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>, 
 #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>,
 #<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>]
Where as, I want to get these results:
[#<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>,
#<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>, 
 #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>, 
 #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>,
 #<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>]
This is the query being generated from the logs:
[4;35;1mUser Load (0.6ms)[0m   [0mSELECT * FROM "users" WHERE ("users"."id" = 1) LIMIT 1[0m
[4;36;1mShow Load (3.0ms)[0m   [0;1mSELECT * FROM "shows" ORDER BY date ASC, attending DESC[0m
[4;35;1mUser Load (0.6ms)[0m   [0mSELECT * FROM "users" WHERE ("users"."id" = 1) [0m
Finally, here is my model:
  create_table "shows", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "headliner"
    t.string   "openers"
    t.string   "venue"
    t.date     "date"
    t.text     "description"
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
    t.decimal  "price"
    t.time     "showtime"
    t.integer  "attending",   :default => 0
    t.string   "time"
  end
What am I missing?  What am I doing wrong?
UPDATE: Thanks for all your help, but it seems that all of you were stumped as much as I was.  What solved the problem was actually switching databases.  I switched from the default sqlite3 to mysql.