How to pick up a celebrity, even especially if you're a journalist

In the new Esquire, former NYT rock critic / current Angeleno-about-town Neil Strauss, who’s about to publish a book (A ReganBook, no less) about his experiences in those how-to-pick-up-women seminars one gets lots of spam about, describes how he almost picked up Britney Spears in the course of interviewing her. Strauss uses the various tricks he’s learned from these dating gurus– reading her eye movements, using a conversational construct called a ‘yes ladder’ (“capturing her attention by asking questions that require an obvious answer”), and so forth.