In 1965 when Rhonda Coullet (nee Oglesby) was crowned as Miss Arkansas, she decided in the third month of ribbon-cutting that her duties lay on the frivolous side (presumably Queen Elizabeth could jump to this same conclusion, but England isn’t Arkansas). The young beauty queen caught the next ride out of Lafayette County to become a singing star in Hollywood.

And she did. She won a starring role in the revolutionary rock musical Hair, at the Aquarius Theatre. (Miss Coullet was the first Hair actor to volunteer to appear nude on stage: “I figured, how much worse could it be than walking in a skimpy swimsuit down a runway?”)

After a year and a half wowing audiences in Los Angeles, the producers asked her to take the show on the road for three years of touring in Europe. Later, resettling in New York, she starred in the National Lampoon Radio Show alongside John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Christopher Guest, Bill Murray and Gilda Radner.

All along Ms. Coullet was busily developing her talents as a singer, teaching herself to play the guitar and composing her own songs. In 1982 she performed her single West Heaven on Saturday Night Live as a tribute to Mr. Belushi, who had recently died. Her husband, musician Armand Coullet, to whom she was married from 1970 to 1980, died soon after Belushi.

Ms. Coullet’s acting and musical career included starring roles in Broadway’s The Robber Bridegroom and Pump Boys and Dinettes. In the meantime, in her continuing parts on and off Broadway, Ms. Coullet has been hard at work on her own album, The American Secret, which includes semi-autobiographical songs that have worked their way into her current theatrical musical production, Runaway Beauty Queen, a juicy chunk of which she will perform as a fundraiser for the Vineyard Playhouse on Saturday at her old friend Judy Belushi Pisano’s Vineyard Haven home.

Meeting the once cute-as-a-button Miss Arkansas with her long-ago blond hair flip, wide blue eyes and angelic smile now, one is agreeably surprised to find a still beautiful but wholly unrecognizable 64-year-old woman with less burnished but still blond hair pulled back in a casual bun, shell-white-rimmed glasses, and an aura of wisdom and intelligence that undoubtedly crossed its Rubicon when the young woman’s fingers lost their grip on the ribbon-cutting scissors.

It turns out Runaway Beauty Queen, which Ms. Coullet has already performed in Sarasota with eight cast members, is about more — much more — than tossing away one’s tiara and lighting out for the Territory of Sunset and Vine. For years the actress-singer has consumed herself in spiritual studies, much of it engaged in goddess worship as iterated by anthropologists Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas. She also has steeped herself in Buddhist and Hindu cosmologies and has even read Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy.

Ms. Coullet has taken as a metaphor and inspiration for her own experiences and the perilous state of the planet, the Greek myth of the seven sisters of the Pleiades.

“They were the daughters of Atlas but he was too burdened with holding up the world to take care of them. Consequently they were constantly under threat of amorous assault from the warrior god, Orion. Zeus took pity on the Pleiades and turned them into doves, then transformed them into stars. However . . .,” she pauses dramatically in the telling, “the seventh Pleiades sister disappeared. I believe she’s lost in all of us. Until we find her, we and the planet won’t be healed.”

Ms. Coullet has added other crucial elements to what she calls her “goddess rock musical,” such as a pregnancy in her hippy days and the baby she gave up for adoption. With a great deal of sleuthing, she reunited with her son who was then 21 years old. “It was giving away my son that started me on my spiritual path. From that time forward, I couldn’t stop thinking about him.”

The performer/philosopher reveals that some risque songs in her musical struck the elite guard for the Playhouse fundraiser as over-the-top for New England audiences, though Ms. Coullet said these sexy songs were received with high hilarity from octogenarian women in Sarasota.

This weekend’s event is bound to be a delight for all attending but, the Vineyard Playhouse might consider bringing back Rhonda Coullet for a full production of her misadventures with Arkansas beauty pageants and her search for the missing Pleiades sister. An hour spent with this talented and original woman was fascinating for one lone journalist; an evening with a packed theatre would be certifiably amazing.

Cocktails with a Runaway Beauty Queen and a preview of the musical are on Saturday, August 22, from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 112 William street in Vineyard Haven. Tickets are $125 per person; call 508 693-6450, extension 29 for reservations.