is there anyway to put the content of the page in a modal popup without the page header or footer?

Totally but you are going to have to either use PHP or manipulate the template files in your theme.

You could create a page using hook_menu() with php, or manipulate the template files in your theme.. Take a look at page.tpl.php and change it to not include the headers and footers.. Note, this will affect ALL pages. To my knowledge, there isn't an easy way to have seperate page template per content type without using php.
http://highrockmedia.com/blog/creating-custom-content-type-page-template...
http://www.shekhargovindarajan.com/tips-n-tricks/drupal-6-different-page...

However, this module appears to let you select a custom page template for a given node type.
http://drupal.org/project/node_page

You could then take the page.tpl.php file and customize it, rename it to say, page-.tpl.php and use it for a node type..

Otherwise, Probably the easiest way to do this is to point your link to a node and not a page.. Then you will get only the node content and not the page template. So you're url would be 'node/333' to get there. This will just display the contents of node.tpl.php. Of course you can change this very easily per node content by simply creating a custom node template and renaming it as such, node-.tpl.php.

Ah, no.. those are pages.

Just add the following to your template.php file. Then you create a page-type-my_content_type.tpl.php in your theme directory. Replace my_content_type with the name of your content type.

/**
* Override or insert PHPTemplate variables into the templates.
*/
function phptemplate_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
  if ($vars['node']->type != "") {
      $vars['template_files'][] = "page-type-" . $vars['node']->type;
    }
}

The answers here look good. Closing.