All depends on your goals. If you want to do programming for a living definitely learn C first. You may not necessarily use it ever again, but learning C will give you a good idea(and appreciation for!) of what the other, higher level languages are doing.
Once you have a firm grasp of C the world is your oyster, you can try to tackle one of the "scripting" languages such as python or ruby. Though first you may want to familiarize yourself a little bit with OO programming that is a bit more like C, in that case I would recommend Java, Objective-C or, shudder to say, C#. They have a very C-like syntax while still being object oriented.
After that languages like Python and Ruby can be a dream, and since you have a firm understanding of what is going on underneath the covers you are probably more likely to avoid some of the performance pitfalls that novices can fall into....
That being said, if your goal is to just write a couple of basic utilities/applications, Python or Ruby is the way to go. As long as you don't try anything too complex you can do a lot with them without having to really know what they are doing underneath the covers. It's only when you really get into the large-scale stuff that you have to be careful with those languages.
Anyway, I've ranted on, whatever you pick just stick with it.