Hmm, although the original questions are still valid, Cais solved my underlying problem of getting my asides to work in another post – it involved following directions (without trying to read too much into them) – hence the theme DOES handle post formats, even though I don’t know how I would have found that information on my own.
I guess my next question is “would this issue be considered ‘resolved’ or not?”
Wow, thank you so much. After making your changes and experimenting with my new toy (I did find that I also needed to hit the preview button), I went back and read the readme.txt file again – I’m not sure how I came up with my earlier interpretation. Again, thanks.