Share resources between layouts in Rails 3

OK, so Ive set up my mailer in Rails which works fine, but I wanted to make a new action (or maybe just a view?) to have a slimmed down contact form in a lightbox. I can do that all fine and dandy but it would use the default layout which I dont want. So I added:

render :layout => 'lightbox'

to the action so that I could use a new layout. Unfortunately that seems to block off my access to the model as I get this error when the lightbox pops up

undefined method `model_name' for NilClass:Class
 #on this line
<% form_for @contact, :url => {:action => "create"}, :html => {:method => :post} do |f| %>

So by using a different layout I cant use the resources I set up in my routes which is here:

  resources :contacts, :only => [:new, :create], :as => :contacts
  #Im passing in a name to the email form
  match "contacts/direct/:name" => "开发者_如何学Pythoncontacts#direct", :as => :direct_email

I hope that made sense. But what do I do?