Today I was going to talk about the moon landing, and I decided what BETTER video clip to show than the bit from the movie Citizen Ruth when Ruth gets rescued by the pro-choice lesbian couple. If you have never seen Citizen Ruth I recommend it, provided you can take some good-natured hits against whatever side of the abortion debate you might be on (for both sides are brought to task for their militancy), and provided you can stand Ruth herself, who is probably THE most unlovable, unpleasant and downright offensive anti-hero to come along in some time. Seriously, she's a trip.

Anyway, in the course of the movie, poor Ruth--whose native intelligence is not quite up there in the first place, even before her history of huffing various solvents, glues and paints--finds herself pregnant, pretty much gets a court order to terminate said pregnancy, and quickly becomes and unwitting and unwilling pawn and both sides take turns kidnapping her and trying to recruit her to their side. Only to find, after putting up with her for a very brief while, that she is not quite Poster Child material. Meaning, she is pretty much a nasty, nasty person who will exploit whomever she is with in order to get more substances to huff.

It's all rather amusing in a dark, evil sort of way. I enjoyed it for the most part, but what I was looking for specifically is, when Ruth is taken in by the pro-choice crowd, she stays with this couple who, among sundry other charms, worship the moon--or, perhaps, "worship" is too strong of a word; but they revere the moon in a really funny scene in which they step outside to admire said moon and burst spontaneously into some sort of New Age moon-praising song. So there's this great shot where the camera moves from one woman, singing with upraised eyes toward the moon, and then the second woman, who likewise is reverently singing, and then to a bewildered Ruth, who keeps looking at them and then looking at the moon, quite baffled over the whole thing.

We just roared when we saw it, and I was hoping to find it on YouTube, but the closest I could find was an NYT movie review. Which is a pretty good overview of the movie, but really tends to emphasize the unpleasantness of the debate within the movie more than I wanted to emphasize on Mojo's happy-go-lucky tra-la-la blog. The shot I am talking about is there briefly around the 1:47 time. But taken out of context and in the middle of a serious intellectual discussion on culture wars it's just not as funny as I wanted it to be.

So instead I will give you Ye Olde Standby of Ella Singing "How High the Moon":

Or an older Ella, doing it again:

Or how about Ella and Frank singing "Moonlight in Vermont":

Or Ella at JATP doing "Blue Moon":

But instead let's go another route entirely and have Ella sing "Old Macdonald Had a Farm." (No, I am not kidding. I'm sure Ella could sing a PHONE BOOK and make it fun.)