ActionScript 3.0 :: "Pause" The Thread And Continue After An Event Is Finished?

Often i would like to wait for an event to fire before continuing my code. I hate to have to create tons of functions to fire one after the other in a sequence when it makes much more sense for all the code to be in one function.

So instead of myFunct1() to fire myFunct1_part2 which fires myFunct1_part3, i would like to have all the code of all the functions in myFunct1().

The reason i can't do this is that i continuously need some values that aren't set until an event is fired. This is an example:

ActionScript Code:
var xml:XML;
xmlhandler = new XMLHandler();
xmlhandler.addEventListener("xmlLoaded", function() { xml = xmlhandler.xmldata; });
xmlhandler.loadXML(path);

[Code]....