One morning last summer, filmmaker Edith Edit brought her crew to the north side to shoot a scene for her new movie, Dominatrix Waitrix. It featured two actresses making out in front of a building just across the street from Zephyr restaurant. “Of course we were late,” she says. “When we got there it was in the middle of brunch hour, and there were families across the street. Someone called the cops. Three or four cop cars showed up, and one cop pulled us aside and said, ‘We heard there was some lewd behavior going on.’ I guess they thought we were doing something very illegal, like naked people having sex.
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By then the 30-year-old artist–who uses a pseudonym because “having an alias frees you up to take more risks in your work”–had already shot most of the footage for the hour-long digital video feature, which she describes as “a sci-fi musical queer sex romp.” The tale of a sexually voracious, leather-clad human clone who takes over the bodies of overworked waiters and preys on their customers, Waitrix does have a few hard-core sex scenes, including one involving the two leads and a pepper grinder. But the opening musical number is a G-rated send-up of Busby Berkeley’s “We’re in the Money” sequence from Gold Diggers of 1933, featuring a chorus of robotic servers in wigs and scarlet hoop skirts waving silver trays and chanting, “Can I take your order, sir?”
She sees a parallel between S-M and the waiter-customer relationship: “The dominatrix controls whether you’re going to eat or not and says, ‘Oh no, we don’t have any more of that’ even if you do. The domme ultimately has control but is still dependent on the customer for tips and for money.”
