Whether you call it the "Hostess City of the South" or the "Creative Coast," Savannah, Georgia's nickname for some of the coolest stuff on public radio is SCAD.

For longer than I've been aware, Matthew Terrell and Jeff Gill, together with the Savannah College of Art and Design, have produced wonderfully offbeat graduate student-oriented pieces in their Commentary Corral series. Interstitals in this series feature such young writers as Megan Laguerella describing the perils of a student trying to rent an apartment, Paul Weinberg talking about the anxiety of an actor going on auditions, and Tandy Versyp sounding off about the plight of a food server hungering for customers' tips.

Ashley Schleeper does double duty in SCAD's latest installment of Commentary Corral pieces. Her monologue, "Whatever Happened to Manners?" deploring the lack of old-fashioned courtesy -- or, we could call it ante-bellum Southern gentility -- puts her right up there with Emily Post.

The piece under review here is consistent in its portrait of Schleeper as someone with an unflappably sunny disposition. Considering anti-depressants, psychotherapy, and the prevalence of a kind of fashionable despair in our culture, Schleeper's indefatigable grin is a many-splendored thing. Like the cheerleader she used to be, she's got the go/fight/win peppy (preppy?) attitude that once was extolled as "the power of positive thinking."

Yet if it's true that "the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation" [Thoreau], and "Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination" [Twain], Schleeper feels out of sync with her generation -- and indeed with the culture at large. Does anyone believe the old line, "Smile, and the world smiles with you"? Schleeper is not about to cry, much less cry alone, about being happy. But she's sheepish about her lack of angst, especially as a student in art school.

Five stars go to Schleeper -- and to SCAD for its scads of uncommonly good pieces, a veritable corral of thoroughbred commentaries.