It turned out that this problem was only related to one of the cell phone simulators (it worked in other simulators).
BTW, I had another problem that stumped me for a while. It turns out that WML is very picky in the actual phone (versus the phone simulators), or atleast in my phone.
I had a <BR /> tag with the wrong slash (ie, I had <BR >) and that yielded an error in my phone that read "500: Web Service error ..."
It's worth it to closely proofread WML