By:SUSAN LIN
During the day, he's just Mr. Martielli, a teacher of environmental
studies and physics at Holy Trinity High School in Hicksville. He's 39, and a typical day for him might involve trying not to get chalk on his clothes, or grading the quizzes returned by the 16- and 17-year-old students he instructs.
If high school teachers can be generalized as a patient, encouraging and mundane bunch, Mr. Martielli appears to be an exception. For one thing, during evenings, the group he caters to doesn't address him as Mr. Martielli. They call him Spider Nick. And his aides? The MadDogs.
Spider Nick and the MadDogs is a Long Island-based band, and also the featured act the last night of the 30th annual Nassau Community College Folk Festival, which runs Tuesday to Thursday, April 3-5, in Garden City.
Martielli got his spider association because he's more than just intellectually curious about the eight-legged creatures. In one fateful night about 20 years ago, Martielli was practicing his saxophone at his Huntington apartment, when a fishing spider crawled onto the wall in the room. At three inches (including its furry legs), fishing spiders are capable of catching small minnows in a pond, said Martielli.
Although such a domestic scenario might provoke a reaction in other people, Martielli decided to finish the piece he was working on. Then he thought he might as well let the spider live and have the roam of the apartment. A few days later, it left a sack of eggs on his wall.
Martielli gingerly moved the pouch into a box and kept it warm. He planned to let the babies live in the apartment, too, but the 500 spiders that emerged quickly got out of hand. So Martielli had no choice but to set them free in his backyard, which conveniently contained a wet log with those white bugs
