Hello again. I thought I'd share what I discovered about the menus. Dude--please delete this post and/or correct it if these solutions are too kludgy or if they could cause other problems!
1) I figured out how to create a "label" for my top-level menu options. Go to Appearance=>Menus. Build your custom menu. Where you need a label, don't add a page. Instead, add a "Custom Link" using a hash symbol (#) for the URL. It may rewrite the hash in the process of adding it to the menu, but you can re-enter/save the url again once it's included. Make sure there's no http... just the hash. Then, remove the css hover styles for that menu level. Now they look like labels and if clicked, nothing happens.
2)The solution for hiding/revealing the first-level submenus worked well, but I needed my sub menus to expand/drop down *over* the content rather than bumping down the content (I LOVE Kriesi's bump-down effect, but the client will undoubtedly add waaay too many pages for that to work). So I added the earlier code plus the following snippet to my custom.css and I now have more traditional drop downs:
.main_menu .menu {
position: absolute;
top: 58px;
left: 595px;
z-index: 1000;
}
#header
.container {
overflow:visible;
}