Colbyville to be Renamed Ben&Jerryville or Heady Topper Town???

The following letter was written to the Waterbury Record, which published in the July 14 issue of the Waterbury Record  a list  of the best of Waterbury or some such and  I was called Mr. Waterbury.  Iam honored to be a Mr. Waterbury that nobody knows. That’s good! However, I must decline the title. You see, I am the mayor of Colbyville

Colbyville is somewhat of a hamlet, which is a cluster of houses and a church. Well we had a church but they moved, wisely it turns out, due to creeping sprawl and traffic overload on Route 100. This hamlet has no known boundaries and we truly are in servitude to Waterbury. We pay gawdawful taxes to the state, town and village of Waterbury, for which we are whacked with the back of the hand. As one town official told me years ago, Colbyville is a dumping ground.

I was not elected mayor; it just came to be after years and a pig roast I held on Ben & Jerry’s property in celebration of my new book, A Lifetime of Vermont People. No politicians, bureaucrats, town officials or media attended the event and that was good too.

However, for all we have been dissed we are home to three big businesses. There is the new Fairfield Inn, under the umbrella of Marriott and a Burlington developer. It is truly a sore sight for tired eyes; The Alchemist, where a bunch of alchemists concoct Heady Topper, so hoppy that two cans of this ale will addle your head; and Ben& Jerry’s, owned by Unilever, a Brit-Dutch conglomerate that is one of the world’s wealthiest food companies. Here in Colbyville Ben&Jerry’s sells thousands of ice cream cones for $5.00 each. They are much smaller and more costly than the ones sold a few years ago. However, the imbibers are all smiles when they have an ice cream cone pasted to their face.

There is a difference between the pairing of their English boss and his Vermont fiefdom. Unilever supports Hilary Clinton for the presidency and gave her between $50 and $100 thousand. Ben & Jerry’s—Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield,—the flesh and blood characters that started the company in a Burlington gas station and made multi millions when they sold out to Unilever, are strong supporters of Bernie Sanders. These three flatlanders were originally New Yorkers but they morphed well into Vermonters.

Back to Colbyville. We residents are a gaggle of independent Vermonters more in tune with Ethan Allen’s sense of a free and independent country instead of being taxed-squashed by the town, state and Feds, as if King George is still squatting on the throne.

We are meeting to vote on some important issues. Should we secede from the town and village of Waterbury, the state of Vermont, which is out of control, and the United States government, which is turning scary? Can we stop that slimy creature called Sprawl? And should we rename our cluster of buildings and GPS coordinates to…Ben&Jerryville or Heady Topper Town?

Peter Miller
Mayor of Colbyville