one Lectora button to control multiple Flash animations?

I have a "menu" button at the root level of my Lectora course so it appears on every page of my course. When clicked, it opens a drop-down course menu. Each page of the course has a Flash animation. When the menu button is clicked, I want the Flash animation to pause. Then, when the menu is closed, I want the Flash animation to resume playing.

I know how to use Flash commands to control an animation, however, I don't want to have to duplicate the menu button on each page so that I can target each Flash animation. Is there any way to have one button control whatever animation happens to be playing?

I also thought about setting a variable in Lectora depending on whether the menu is open or closed and then having the Flash get that variable and pause or play accordingly. I don't actually know how to do this and, from what I've read, there are security issues in Flash 10 that make this difficult anyway.

If anyone has any thoughts on how to accomplish this, I'd love to hear them. I'm using Lectora 9 and Flash CS4, AS2.