as I discovered, sitefinity doesn't support public side permissions out of the box.  It does on the admin side, just not the public facing side.  The particular project I'm on now requires this to a rather high complexity level.  Ok, time to bust out the goods.

I hit their developer manual and find something that looks promising for a couple reasons.  It uses similiar methods I tried thinking it was out of the box.  What I want to interject is this tiny piece of logic...

if (!Roles.IsUserInRole("SomeRole")
{
     // show some stuff!
}
else
{
     // show me nothing!
}

Nothing fancy, nothing over the top just straight and to the point.  That -should- give me what I need ...now, how to make it happen is another task.