the pranks: "…planting a bees' nest at her mother's club meeting, cutting her father's fishing line into little pieces, ripping the fur off her mother's coat, inserting marbles into her father's piano and smearing glue on her baby brother." Yet Snooks was not a mean-spirited child: "The character may have seemed a noisy one-joke idea based on Snooks driving Daddy to a screaming fit," wrote Gerald Nachman in Raised on Radio. "Yet Brice was wonderfully adept at giving voice to her irritating moppet without making Snooks obnoxious." Nachman quoted Variety critic Hobe Morrison: "Snooks was not nasty or mean, spiteful or sadistic. She was at heart a nice kid. Similarly, Daddy was harried and desperate and occasionally was driven to spanking his impish daughter. But Daddy wasn't ill-tempered or unkind with the kid. He wasn't a crab." Brice herself was so meticulous and fanatical about the character that, according to Nachman, "she dressed in a baby-doll dress for the studio audience," and she also appeared in the costume at parades and personal appearances. She also insisted on her script being printed in extremely large type so she could avoid having to use reading glasses when on the air live. She was self-conscious about wearing glasses in front of an audience and didn't believe they fit the Snooks image. By her own admission, Brice was a lackadaisical rehearser: "I can't do a show until it's on the air, kid," she was quoted as telling her writer/producer Everett Freeman. Yet she locked in tight when the show did go on—right down to Snooks-like "squirming, squinting, mugging, jumping up and down," as comedian George Burns remembered. Snooks proved so universally appealing that Brice and Stafford were invited to perform in character on the second installment of The Big Show, NBC's big-budget, last-ditch bid to keep classic radio variety programming alive amidst the television onslaught. Snooks tapped on hostess Tallulah Bankhead's door to ask about a career in acting, despite Daddy's telling her she already didn't have what it took. Later in the show, Snooks and Daddy appeared with fellow guest star Groucho Marx in a spoof of Marx's popular quiz-and-comedy show, You Bet Your Life. Television Brice and Stafford brought Baby Snooks and Daddy to television only once, an appearance on the June 12, 1950, edition of CBS-TV's Popsicle Parade of Stars. This was Fanny Brice's only appearance on television, with Baby Snooks