Short story master Anton Chekhov famously described his process for writing stories by grabbing the nearest object, which happened to be an ashtray: “If you wish…by tomorrow I will write a short story. Its title will be An Ashtray.” His friend Korolenko commented “It seemed that the ashtray had already created images, ideas, and a chain of adventures in his mind.”
What duller object can you get than a dish? But Michael Martone proves that a good writer can imbue any item with metaphorical significance. What do the dishes represent for the girl? What do the dishes represent for the narrator? Now try it yourself: See how an object in your story might on greater significance by meaning different things to different people.
Some Context on “Dish Night” from Mental Floss article “11 Things We No Longer See in Movie Theaters” by Kara Kovalchik
One gimmick that kept movie theaters operating during the very lean 1930s was Dish Night. Money was obviously very tight during the Great Depression, and families had to be extremely cautious when it came to any discretionary spending. A night out at the movies was an unnecessary luxury, and cinema audiences dwindled. Theater owners lowered their ticket prices as much as they could (sometimes as low as 10 cents for an evening feature), but what finally put bodies in seats was Dish Night.
Salem China and a few other manufacturers of finer dinnerware struck deals with theaters across the U.S., selling the theater owner their wares at wholesale and allowing their products to be given away as premiums with each ticket sold. Sure enough, soon housewives were demanding that their husbands take them out to the Bijou every week in order to get a coffee cup, saucer, gravy boat, or dinner plate to complete their place setting. One Seattle theater owner reported by distributing 1000 pieces of china costing him $110 on a Monday night, he took in $300—a whopping $250 more than he’d made the previous Monday.