hidden field populating header/footer trick not working

I'm a bit stumped at this. I have done this before a bunch of times. The difference is that this time I have two rectangles in the footer. For the each, the visibility is set to an expression which checks whether the page is page 1 or 2. If it is 1, the first rectangle is visible, if 2, the second. When I reference the hidden fields on the main area of the report via ReportItems, they come through fine on the first rectangle, but are invisible on the second. I've tried the same exact fields and every time they are visible in rectangle1, and invisible in rectangle2. What is going on here?
Well, just switched the conditional visibility so that rect1 would go on page 2 and rect2 on page one, and guess what? Now these fields on invisible on rect1 and visible on rect2! So it has to do with the page number! Wow, how weird! Anyone see this before and is there any workaround?
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Expressions in the page header/footer can only reference report items on the current page. One thing to check is whether the hidden textbox in the report body is repeated on both pages? If the textbox only appears on the first page, expressions in the header/footer for the second page would always get a null value for this textbox.

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