On Monday, a few hours before Massapequa Park’s Jesse Findling was to appear before an audience of millions on “American Idol,” he appeared, in the flesh, before an audience of 200 at Massapequa High School, his alma mater.
Findling, 20, wore blue jeans and sneakers and beamed at the audience, which included older students he’d shared the stage with in high school musicals, younger ones who’d seen him only on TV, and teachers who remembered him as a kid.
“Talking to you guys, coming back here, little me when I was in high school — this was something I never thought I would do,” Findling said, in a question-and-answer session before he performed.
Real life, it should surprise no one to learn, is harder and uglier than TV. Some days when the show shot he got up at 7 a.m. and didn’t get back to his room until 11 p.m.
“There’s a lot of waiting for me to be only on screen five minutes,” he said. Findling witnessed “a lot of breakdowns, a lot of people getting sad because what they sang didn’t go how they thought it would … My head space is, I’m just going to go and sing, and whatever happens, happens.”
Monday’s episode of “American Idol” includes viewer voting, which will help determine who moves forward in the competition. Findling has made it through several rounds and is among 20 remaining contestants.
“Talking to you guys, coming back here, little me when I was in high school — this was something I never thought I would do,” Jesse Findling told students and staff Monday at Massapequa High School. Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
Somebody asked Findling about nerves. He gets them, he said. “But I learned, especially on a show like this, there’s kind of no room for nerves.”
His advice was to “take some deep breaths … and don’t let nerves stop you from singing or doing what you want to do, because you’re going to regret it.”
Stephanie Guida, 17, a senior, said she remembered Findling from his performance in “Footloose,” when he was a senior and she was a freshman.
“At that point, he was kind of just like everyone else on stage, there were so many talented people,” Guida said. Listening to him now, she heard “such a strong tone to his voice, he sings with so much passion and emotion … You could just feel his love for what he does.”
It has been months since one of “American Idol’s” talent spotters saw a performance that Findling had posted on social media, an event Vincent Green, the Massapequa district’s director of fine and performing arts, likened to a “lightning strike,” given the hours of content uploaded to those platforms every second.
Findling is not permitted to do interviews, a district representative told Newsday. But elements of his biography — a stutter that sometimes impedes his speech but not his singing, a sister and brother who sing with him when they’re together, a college career at Binghamton University on hold for at least one semester while this thing plays out — are already public, some of them highlighted on “American Idol.”
Show producers even spent a day in December at school with Gina Aspetti, who taught Findling music from kindergarten through fifth grade at East Lake Elementary School in Massapequa Park. Aspetti, who still teaches there, accompanied Findling on piano Monday.
“He was always very musical, but shy,” she told Newsday. “I’m happy to see now that he has the courage to share what I always knew he had as a gift.”
One of the skills that set him apart, Aspetti said, was “amazing breath control … the ability to hold his note a long time without taking a breath. That’s very hard to teach children. He had a natural ability.”
Findling recently returned to her school for chorus rehearsal, Aspetti said.
“We put him on the risers with the little ones and they were mesmerized. We made him sing just where he sang where he was little. He did the stretches, the warmups, and the kids — they were starstruck.”
What’s changed in Findling, said his younger brother, Jack, 15, a 10th grader at Massapequa, isn’t that much, though his day-to-day now includes many show-related Zooms: “A lot of contestants go on that show and come out a completely different person … He’s really just being himself, and it shows.”
Before Findling sang, he apologized. His song selection, from Adele, John Legend, Daniel Caesar and British performer Sienna Spiro, was mostly “super sad,” he said. “I just tend to gravitate to those types of songs.”
He sang with feeling from the stage and the audience cheered. Then he walked down into the audience for selfies and chatted with people who knew him when.
Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.