Actionscript Help for Simple Button Events

Question

Hey everyone,
I'm pretty new to flash and I think this is a fairly simple animation, but I'm not quite sure how to write out the action script for it. I have a website that has very similiar animations to www.cookstreet.net. I have shapes and text that fly in from the bottom when a button is clicked, but I want to get them to fly back out of the top of the screen when any other button is clicked before any new content loads back in from the bottom. What should I add to the action script to tell flash to first check and see if there is content loaded on the screen when a button is clicked, and if there is, to go to the animation that flies that content out of the top and then return to the animation of the new content coming in from the bottom? What I currently have set up for my buttons is:
function handleClick( pEvent:MouseEvent):void
    if( pEvent.target == reel )
        gotoAndPlay("Reel");
    else if( pEvent.target == home)
        gotoAndPlay("Home");
    else if( pEvent.target == news)
        gotoAndPlay("News");
    else if( pEvent.target == film)
        gotoAndPlay("Film")
    else if( pEvent.target == about)
        gotoAndPlay("About")
    else if( pEvent.target == contact)
        gotoAndPlay("Contact")
reel. addEventListener(MouseEvent .CLICK, handleClick );
home. addEventListener(MouseEvent .CLICK, handleClick );
news. addEventListener(MouseEvent .CLICK, handleClick );
film. addEventListener(MouseEvent .CLICK, handleClick );
about. addEventListener(MouseEvent .CLICK, handleClick );
contact. addEventListener(MouseEvent .CLICK, handleClick );
Thanks for the help!
-Sofi

Answer 1

What you can probably do is have a variable that you use to keep track of who's present on the stage, starting it off as a null value.  That way when you click a button if the value is null is skips processing a moving out scenario and jumps to the moving in one.  So your event listeners would be calling a different handler function that first takes care of the moving out needs, if any, which in turn calls the moving in function after the moving out activity is done (or the timeline for moving out does... I don't know how you plan to implement the moving out stuff).  If it is a functiob to function process, the moving out function could pass the event.target to the moving in function so that wouldn't have to change at all, except to add in somewhere wha the new variable value should be.
If what I just offered is one big ball of confusion... take your time and inch your way thru it.