Auth - losing context

This may be a more general OO question than an Auth question, but I hope somebody will know the answer. Up at the top of my script, I do: $a=new Auth(...) Later on, I instantiate a class and call one of it's methods. Down in the method, I need to do a checkLogin() to see if the user is logged in. Then I'm going to do a getUsername(). well, $a is out of context since I'm in a method, but it's there in $GLOBALS, so I do $a=&$GLOBALS['a']; $loggedin = $a->checkLogin(); What I get is 'call to undefined function: checklogin()' I can see the object's members in the debugger (Zend) but what happened to it's binding to it's code? There must be a better way that I'm missing. Does anybody know? Thanks, </edg>