ActionScript 2.0 :: Getting Menu Results Without Callbacks?

Basically, I have a function that when called will display a menu of options that the user can click on. The menu is dynamically generated from the script and each menu item has it's onPress handler setup to call a dynamically generated function that which has access to the index of the menu item (or any other data I choose to pass it).What I would like to happen is that when a menu item is clicked on, the value is somehow passed back to the function (which built the menu), so that it can return it to it's caller. I've got everything but this last bit functioning.The approach I've tried is to give the onPress handler access to a field in the class which holds the menu building function. Then when it's clicked on, it can set the field to it's value. Meanwhile, a while loop in the menu function is waiting for the field to change, and will then return the new field value as it's result.

However, this doesn't work and the reason is obvious. Any sort of busy waiting while loop locks up the flash player. Therefore, it ceases to handle events and so the user cannot click on the menu item (or do anything else for that matter).What would be ideal is some sort of sleepAndHandleEvents function I could call from the while loop, but from what documentation I've searched, I can't find something like that. I've googled around, but so far I haven't found anything.The reason I want the menu selection returned from the function (rather than the usual method of using callbacks) is that it's called from some procedural code. I know I'm going a little bit against the paradigm of flash (which is mostly event oriented), but some things are just procedural in nature and I don't want to split my code into a million little pieces and turn it inside out.