Lambros Garcia plans for life after 'America's Got Talent'

Glen Head’s Lambros Garcia, the 10-year-old dancer who made it to the live qualifiers round of “America’s Got Talent,” is taking his elimination on Wednesday night’s episode in admirable stride.

“I made it this far and I'm so happy about that,” he told Newsday by phone from a Southern California airport the day after the show, en route back home with his parents and his younger sister, Anastasia. “And I'm also very proud of myself because there's lots of talent here, and to be in the top 55 was pretty amazing.” When he heard onstage at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, where “AGT” is shot, that he would not be advancing, he thought, “Oh, dang it,” he says. “I wanted to move forward, of course, but also I reminded myself how far I've gotten because this is a big step.”

Lambros, a student at Mossa Dance Academy in New Hyde Park, did a routine to Todrick Hall's “Vogue Zone” Tuesday night. The song — to which he also had performed in May at a Dance Champs Elite youth event in Port Jefferson — was chosen by his choreographer, California-based Blake McGrath, whom Mossa artistic director Natalie Mossa Wright had contacted. Lambros learned the routine over Zoom in about two hours, broken up in segments over days, he says, and then “did lots of rehearsals with my dance teacher mostly every day, and I was just practicing, practicing, practicing” with Wright and instructor Tami Mele.

In the immediate future, Lambros — who graduated from fifth grade at Glenwood Landing School  in Glen Head and starts this fall at the same town’s North Shore Middle School — has “lots of competitions coming my way,” including the 24 Seven Dance Convention, the American Dance Awards and the Turn It Up Dance Challenge, he says. The Broadway hopeful plans “to push myself more and to work harder, because people are watching me now and more opportunities are coming my way. I need to just work hard for that goal and keep going.”

“This was an amazing journey,” says his mother, Angela Scaliotis-Garcia, 45, director of the English as a New Language and World Languages department of the Amityville Union Free School District. “We are super proud of our son because not only did he show good sportsmanship, he showed professionalism. He was very mature for his years and he didn't take it as a competition where he is going against all these talented people but as an experience of meeting such wonderful people who treated him like family. … We even have a picture of [Golden Buzzer singer] Lavender [Darcangelo] and [child ventriloquist] Brynn Cummings hugging him after he got eliminated, and he has a smile on his face.

“Hopefully,” she adds, “new opportunities will open his way and we'll embrace them one day at a time. Whatever's meant to be.”