Connecting code with a movie clip down the timeline

1

I have some code that is attempting to interact with a movieclip that resides further down the timeline, but can’t seem to do so no matter what I do. I’ve tried absolute and relative addressing, I’ve even sent the playhead to that frame before attempting to interact with the movieclip - nothing works. Am I going crazy here or am I missing some key ingredient? Please refer to the attached image - it shows the location on the main timeline where the code is (1) and where the MC is (2).

I will post a code snippet here:

function handleLoginResponse(re:ResultEvent){
    trace("<handleLoginResponse>: we called login succesfully: " + re.result + "  Going to loading screen");    
    gotoAndStop("loading");// moves playhead to frame where statusMC is
    trace("statusMC current frame= " + statusMC._currentframe());// returns "undefined"
    statusMC.gotoAndStop("loading");
    // Authentication Successful
    if( re.result == '0' ) {        
        gotoAndStop("loading");    
        statusMC.gotoAndPlay("success");// these two lines 
        statusMC.firstName.text = user;// work fine for some reason.
    }    
    // Authentication Failure
    else {
        gotoAndStop("loading");
        statusMC.gotoAndStop("failure");        
    }
}