Just sit right back and you’ll read a tale of a well-known 1960s TV actress in Driggs, Idaho, who was busted for pot.

A surprise party for 69-year-old Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island, ended with an almost three-hour tour of the Teton County Sheriff’s Office and jail when the actress, who perhaps should have been called Mary Jane, was caught with marijuana in her vehicle — and no, it wasn’t the S.S. Minnow – while driving home.

Wells is now serving six months of unsupervised probation for the crime. She was sentenced February 29 to five days in jail, fined $410.50 and placed on probation after pleading guilty to one count of reckless driving. I can hear it now — “Your freedom will be lost/Your freedom will be lost.”

The guilty plea came as part of an agreement with prosecutors in which three misdemeanor counts — driving under the influence, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a controlled substance — were dropped.

The case began the night October 18, 2007, when Teton County Sheriff’s Deputy Joseph Gutierrez arrested Wells as she was driving home from a surprise birthday party. She posted $4,000 bail and appeared in court on the charges the following day, pleading not guilty. The case was scheduled to go to trial March 13, but the trial was canceled because of the plea agreement.

The sheriff’s office report states that Gutierrez pulled Wells over after noticing her swerve across the fog lines and center lines of State Highway 33 and repeatedly speed up and slow down.

“I exited my patrol vehicle and immediately was able to smell a strong odor of burning marijuana,” Gutierrez wrote in his report. “As I approached the vehicle I noticed all four window (sic) of the vehicle were lowered and the female driver was not wearing a jacket.”

When Gutierrez asked why he could smell marijuana, Wells reportedly told him that she’d just given a ride to three hitchhikers and had dropped them off when they began smoking something. When Gutierrez searched the car, he found three half-smoked joints in the ashtray and console, according to the report. A second search after Wells’ arrest netted a fourth half-smoked blunt and two small cases used to store the stuff, Gutierrez said.

After Wells failed a field sobriety test, she was placed in handcuffs and taken to the sheriff’s office — again, not in the S.S. Minnow.

Wells’ attorney, Ron Swafford, of Idaho Falls, told the Post Register, a newspaper there, that a friend of Wells’ voluntarily testified that he’d left a small amount of marijuana in the vehicle after having used the vehicle that day, and that Wells was unaware of it.

Swafford said that several witnesses were prepared to testify that Wells had very little to drink at the party and was not intoxicated when she left. He said she was swerving on the road because she was trying to find the heater controls in her new car.

Wells is the founder of the Idaho Film and Television Institute in Driggs and the organizer of the region’s annual family movie festival called the Spud Fest.