San Francisco Film Society Oral History Project Interview with ...

JEANNETTE ETHEREDGE: Not a helluva lot.
SHEILA CADIGAN: What was your first language?
JEANNETTE ETHEREDGE: My first language was Russian. Chinese. Japanese. And then I
learned to speak English when I was, I guess, about eight.
SHEILA CADIGAN: Here in the U.S.?
JEANNETTE ETHEREDGE: Yes. We came here. My grandparents had already come. They’d
come to San Francisco, so that’s why we came here, and I grew up here. And now I speak
English.
SHEILA CADIGAN: There’s a large Armenian community where I live in the Sunset.
JEANNETTE ETHEREDGE: Oh, yeah. Well, there are all those churches out there. My mother
had a restaurant, a pretty terrific restaurant.
MIGUEL PENDÁS: What was it called?
JEANNETTE ETHEREDGE: It was called Bali’s because our last name was Valiance, before I
got married to Etheredge. So, she had a restaurant and it was kind of like the Russian Tearoom in
New York. Do you know it?
SHEILA CADIGAN: Hmmm.
JEANNETTE ETHEREDGE: And she had a lot of artists and people like that coming to her
restaurant. I remember meeting George Gund at the restaurant. He had brought two busloads of
Georgian folk dancers who were performing in Berkeley. He brought them all to my mother’s
restaurant at, like, 11:30 at night, after they finished performing. I just remember everybody
moving tables out so that after they finished eating, they could dance. My mother knew the
Coppolas—they had come here to San Francisco—and a lot of those filmmakers—Phil Kaufman
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