A hand model stand-in for Edie Falco on the Showtime hit “Nurse Jackie,” yesterday slapped an elite Manhattan catering company with a class action lawsuit, charging it performed a five-finger discount by cheating its employees out of $3 million in tips.
Lisa-Marie Palmieri, 42, who has had movie roles in “The Interpreter” with Sean Penn and Lindsay Lohan’s “Chapter 27” is suing her former employee, the SoHo-based Great Performances/Artists as Waitresses catering company and its CEO Lisbeth Neumark in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Palmieri claims the catering company bills clients a mandatory “service charge” but doesn’t inform them it’s not a gratuity for the waitstaff.
Instead the company “unlawfully” pockets the service charge.
Workers are also instructed to tell clients they are “taken care of” if they are offered a tip at an event.
Matthew Blit and Amanda Gudis, high-powered lawyers for the actress who waitresses and bartends between gigs, say the practice is in violation of New York labor law.
In the opening sequence of Nurse Jackie, Palmieri slides on and off a wedding ring on what appears to be Falco’s hand.
Palmieri, who is also running for president of the New York chapter of the Screen Actors Guild, recalls how her hands were first discovered while working at the Kaufman-Astoria studios in Brooklyn as an extra in the now cancelled 2008 “Life on Mars” with Harvey Keitel.
When an actress called in sick, “They needed someone to fill in and hand model,” Palmieri told the Post. That led to the next gig on “Nurse Jackie.”
“They loved my hands. They were smooth and boxy and what the writers of the show wanted. “They put me in the same uniform that she was in, which are blue scrubs.”
Palmieri has no idea why her hands were used instead of the star’s.
“Edie Falco she is very nice woman. She has very delicate hands.”
But, she added, “That happens all the time. Not everybody’s tuchus is their own. It’s common for actors and actresses to use stands-ins for body parts for continuity and the character they’re playing.”
