Thanks Jason for the help so far. That solved the problem I was having. I also added ":first" to a couple of things to make it work even better.
Now for some reason, the content of the dialog is not being displayed. >From what Firebug is showing, append or dialog has taken the html and messed it up. Each div tag in the dialog content has a style attr with a lot of css in it and the content inside of the divs have been stripped away. Not a lot of information to go by... would "clone" be a better jQuery function to use than append? I had it working correctly with append in a single test dialog, but now with this dynamic applying it isn't working. Maybe the append is adding the future dialog content to the wrong location? I'll try some things out until a better idea comes around.