get items in a Dropdown as a list

I have a static Dropdown with (say) 5 options: A, B, C, D and E.

is there a way to call these options as a list?

alert Dropdown ;

will only return the selected item ("-Select-"), not all the options.

I'd expect that to be the result for (which it also is)

alert input.Dropdown;

this doesn't work either:

alert Picklist.toList();

any suggestions?

(I'm hoping to find a way to make a subselection for a list without having to lookups all the time, because this lookup is significantly slowing down the app).