Wow, I actually understood what you just said (sort of).

So, is there a way to workaround this "bubbling" thing... because, I'm adverse to manually overriding the stage.focus property, which makes since in this simplified example because there's a small amount of interactivity (things to click on) for the user. But, if there's more complicated things, like drag and drop interface, etc., I doubt I would want to manually reset the focus to the stage... stage.focus = stage;

So, as I understand the bubbles up thing... if myPlay_btn has focus... a keyboard event will bubble up through the parents until it reaches the stage, correct?

However, if myPlay_btn has focus, but no longer exists on the timeline... it has no parents to bubble up through, and therefore the keyboard event never reaches the stage, correct?

How would you recommend dealing with the scenario where an object that doesn't exist has focus?