Jersey Girl. Strange World.

Jersey Girl. Strange World. written and performed by Faith Alpher, is a warm and funny trip across the country, and one I was glad to take. Part of FRIGID New York’s Gotham Storytelling Festival at UNDER St. Marks, the show follows Alpher from Teaneck, New Jersey, through Virginia Beach, Pittsburgh, and Harlem before landing her in Livermore, California, where she was recently sworn in as the city’s first Poet Laureate of color.

Alpher is a natural storyteller, but the show truly shines when she slips out of conversation and into the spoken word. Those poems lift the evening each time they arrive, whether she is channeling Flo, an older coworker who explains menopause in a restaurant parking lot, or answering the woman who grabbed her hair at a rodeo parade.

My favorite story was her Harlem wedding, which begins with Alpher watching the wedding video years later and noticing that the Black guests sat on one side of the church and the white guests on the other. Her white mother-in-law, worried about the drive, had even rented a limo bus for the relatives who didn’t want to brave New York. Once the pastor pronounced them husband and wife, though, the whole church broke into clapping and hallelujahs, and the reception became a United Nations of celebration, with Jewish dancing, an Irish blessing, and a Soul Train line that her mother-in-law joined, all the while still clutching her purse under her arm. When Alpher cued the music and recreated that line for us, I was taken back to my own childhood as a very white kid in very white rural Ohio, sitting in front of the television watching Soul Train and wishing I could be part of a world much bigger than the few square miles I called home. Imagining those two families meet on the dance floor felt like a small answer to that wish, and it was the most joyful moment of the night for me.

If I wished for anything, it would be a stronger thread running from beginning to end, perhaps a callback that ties the many stops together, so the episodes feel like one journey rather than a series of separate stories. That is a very small note, though, and it never made the show less enjoyable. My face held a smile long after I left. Alpher is a gifted storyteller and poet, and her closing words on finding a place that truly sees you is well worth the trip.