Is it possible to pick segments of a mesh in a DTS to hide

I have a player model with skinned segmented meshes. Is it possible to create a function or does one exist that would allow a specific segment to be selected and it's visibility turned on and off? I've incorporated the "hide node in model" code that Justin Mette wrote which works great if the mesh is a child of a Bip node. Since there is a skin modifier on the mesh segments they have to remain a child of the scene.

I was thiking something like
use an array to identify all the submeshes
then use something like
%player.getmesh(x)
%player.hideMesh('meshname")
for use during runtime
or something like that
I'm a modeler not programmer so what I just wrote is probably incoherent ... but any comments would be apprecieted.