Can I Assign An Event To A Global Variable?

I was wondering if anyone knew if/how to assign an event to
a global variable?

I tried to do it and IE 7 came back with an error saying "Member not
found"
My code looked similar to the following:

var globalEvevnt;
function showPopup(event){
globalEvent = event;
alert(globalEvent.type);
setTimeout(function(){unhideDiv()}, 2000 );

}

function unhideDiv(){
alert(globalEvent.type); //Member not found error found on this
line
}

I was wondering if I had declared the globalEvent = new Object();
would that make any difference? I thought everything in JS was an
object so the event could be stored to one as well?