Super helpful- Thank you both! I woke up at 3 a.m. to check the forum, and found two very different answers, and both would work. The shorter, 'wrapper' approach is particularly appealing because it uses less real estate and (to me, at my present basic level of Python and Pythonista understanding) is more intuitive.
Picking an item from a scrollable pop-up list seems like a really basic action that shouldn't take more than a couple of lines of code, but then again I'm not a trained programmer, just someone who needs to get something relatively complex done on an iPad platform within a tight time-frame.
Again, thanks to both of you!