Thanks for the response. I initially got an error when trying to use the .find method, so after a little playing around I came up with a slightly different solution binding the method into the callback function. Here's what I got:
A plugin called "jcade" can do what you are looking for.
In your menu code, you would call something like:
$("#selector").create("span",function(event){
alert(event.target);
});
After that, any time a <SPAN> element is added to your container (regardless of how it gets there, by ajax, innerHTML, other framework), your event gets called.