Can anyone point me in the direction of...

use a gate with sidechain feature and sidekick. its a free vst plugin.

Part of the problem I'm having with it is either I get the trigger to affect the comp, but can't get the comp to affect the micd track - OR - I can get the comp to affect the micd track, but can't get the trigger to open the gate. Seems part of the answer is having a "keyed" function on a gate...SideKick has that, but I still couldn't get it to work.
 
Ah. ok.

"Receiveing audio (sidechaining your audio)
To receive audio from the virtual channels Alpha, Beta, Gamma and/or Delta, do the following:
Open a SideKickV3 on the (stereo)channel you want to sidechain and select the virtual channels (Alpha, Beta, Gamma and/or Delta) under 'use virtual channel' to use the audio on those virtual channels as sidechain input.

Note: This plugin needs to be loaded twice into 2 seperate channels in your VST host to be able to work. Because the plugins can 'see' eachother and use each others audio input. "