Matt,
I was taking a look at this again and I'm not sure if I quite answered your question. Can you outline your end goal here? Are you looking to create a dropdown using the contact name based on a another table? If so, you'll need to first add the Contact.RecordID and then link in the Contact.Name field. The reason you cannot use the name field is that it is not unique and the dropdown needs to be based on a unique field in order to add it to a table.
Let me know if I'm on the right track for what you are trying to do.
Adam