Mathplotlib - passing reference to axs to function

[qmfoam]

I have defined a series of subplots:

fig, ((ax1, ax3), (ax2, ax4), (ax5, ax7), (ax6, ax8)) = plt.subplots(4,2)
fig.subplots_adjust(left = .1, right = 1., bottom = .1, \
                    top = .9, wspace = .2, hspace = .5)

For several of these axes, I want to place vertical lines at events specified in a dictionary:

for ev in majorEvents.values():
    ax1.axvline(ev[6], ev[1], ev[2], color = ev[3], linestyle = ev[4],\
                marker = ev[5], label = ev[0])

In this case it was ax1. But I want to do this in several of the axes. I can certainly replicate this short code where I need it, but I would like to create a function that would do this for me. All I would have to do is pass the axes indicator: ax1, ax3, etc.

So the function I have is:

def showEvents(plotID):
    for ev in majorEvents.values():
        eval(plotID + '.axvlines(ev[6], ev[1], ev[2], color = ev[3], \
             linestyle = ev[4], marker = ev[5], label = ev[0])')

When I call the function,

showEvents('ax1') 

i get the following:

Error:
  File "/Users/me/Python/Umbrella/umbrella.py", line 463, in <module>
    showEvents("ax1")

  File "/Users/me/Python/Umbrella/umbrella.py", line 122, in showEvents
    eval(plotID + '.axvlines(ev[6], ev[1], ev[2], color = ev[3], \

  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>

AttributeError: 'AxesSubplot' object has no attribute 'axvlines'

So passing a string with the reference to the axes to the function and then concatenating and evaluating the resultant does not work.

Not sure where to go from here.

Any suggests would be greatly appreciated.