Playing Cupid

Before dating apps, there was Dinner Dates – and Hillie Marshall was playing Cupid.

A sharp, funny and honest memoir of building an introduction agency – and witnessing every kind of bizarre intrigue imaginable.

Playing Cupid is the story of Dinner Dates, an introduction and social events agency founded by Hillie Marshall in the late 1980s, while she was working as a busy singer and theatre producer. It is a time capsule of how we dated before the online era. Without technology or social media, she built a thriving business that brought happiness and companionship to thousands.

Twenty years later, Hillie had become an agony aunt, a dating expert on TV and radio, and the author of several self-help books, having witnessed a lifetime’s worth of sweethearts, scoundrels, stalkers, survivors, bounders, rebounders, happy endings – and a few tragedies.

But life was never easy. Hillie’s staff needed all their resilience and ingenuity to win clients, calm tempers, avert disasters and keep the bills paid. With humorous stories from the dating scene and her theatre career – and the horror ones too – Playing Cupid is a tale of resilience, risk-taking and seizing opportunities.