FWIW, it's not at all uncommon nor considered "un-Lispish" by the Lisp community (at least the Common Lisp community; I don't presume to speak for the Schemers) to do things like use variables,
, etc. (In fact, that's why those sorts of things are in the language.) Spend some time reading code that some very good Lisp programmers post to comp.lang.lisp and this will be clear. :-)