I'm in Lisbon with an international ad agency making a Romanian television commercial for a French telecom company. Which is not something I've done before. And--I learned the words for "makeup and wardrobe" in Portuguese.

This was my first-ever crowd scene. The girl in pink, Margarida, interacts with me but everybody else just has to pretend like that stoplight isn't a prop and that bush in the foreground is a living thing.

This was my view from the back seat of a fake taxi. It wasn't my first car-mounted camera--in fact, it was my third--but it was my first-ever police escort. Not too grand a motorcade, just a motorcycle cop in the front and another in the rear, but we needed one long take so: no red lights for the poet.

This boy plays me as a boy. The blonde hair is a dead ringer, and the outfit is probably close enough, but they pretty much filmed him just running around and kicking sand. I would've pushed for some science-minded scrutiny of limpets, crabs and/or sandpiper feathers, for accuracy, but this is Lisbon, not Zuma.

This actress plays my mom. She wasn't too wild about the dress they put her in, but I figure that's more of a commentary on what a Portuguese wardrobe supervisor in 2008 imagines a middle-class American woman (with a science-minded son) would wear in California in the 1970's, right? I mean--it's not an actual diss on my mom. Right?

My final scene was my weirdest. The camera crew is up in the balcony and those extras in the front rows are being given precise instructions on how to spontaneously give me a standing ovation. I'm about to step in front of that megawatt light bank and just...take it. Eleven times.