Betty White has her own idea for how she should begin her appearance this weekend on "Saturday Night Live." White, a beloved TV icon, has been told the crowd will likely go nuts when she takes the stage at the beginning of the show. "I would love it if they introduced me and, `Here's Betty White,' and nothing, no applause, no nothing, the audience just stares back at me. I think that would be fun."

That's not going to happen. At 88, White is about to become the oldest host of the NBC comedy showcase, after a Facebook campaign tapped into her amazing cross generational appeal. By late this week, 507,672 fans had joined the "Betty White to host SNL (please?)" Facebook site.

And to think White doesn't even have a Facebook account. "No, I'm a technological spaz," she told reporters on an NBC conference call.

And while she says she's "scared to death" to do the show, it's not because it's live, a twist that rattles most of today's TV performers. White, as she herself points out, was doing live television back when all there was was live television.

She started out in radio and got her first TV exposure on the West Coast in 1949. "I was on five-and-a-half hours a day, six days a week for four years when I started my career in Los Angeles, so I love live television." She says that TV trial by fire was "like going to television college. It was a good experience."

White, of course, is best known from her roles on two TV classics. She played TV homemaker Sue Ann Nivens on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and dim-witted but lovable Rose Nylund on "The Golden Girls." She was also a familiar face for decades on dozens of afternoon game shows, including "Match Game," "Hollywood Squares" and "Password." She met her late husband, Allen Ludden, on "Password."

A true TV pioneer, by the early `50s she was already starring in her own series, "Life with Elizabeth" (for which she won her first of six Emmy Awards in 1952). She went on to become the first female host of a daily network talk show and make countless appearances opposite "Tonight Show" hosts Jack Paar and Johnny Carson.

Sure, things occasionally went wrong on live TV, says White. "I was doing a song on Jack Paar's show and all of a sudden I lost the lyrics," she says. "I made up lyrics as I went along but that is sheer panic. And I have a feeling it's the same kind of panic that I may feel when I do Saturday Night Live."

What has White spooked is what to others is a security blanket -- the fact that, with constant re-writes right down to air time, "SNL" hosts and cast members rely on cue cards during the sketches.

"I never have been able to work from cue cards," she says. "I memorize everything or ad lib it." White would rather do the show without wearing her glasses but, if you see her Saturday night with specs, it's because the cue card print isn't big enough.

Part of White's appeal today is that she continues to work. As David Letterman said on his show this week, she's like the weather this spring, "sunny and in the 80s."

Ever the trooper, she's shocked audiences with ribald lines on edgy cable fare like "The Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner." "I've always had a bawdy sense of humour," she told one critic, suggesting it helped her family get through tough times growing up.

She continues to guest on talk shows like "Chelsea Lately," "Lopez Tonight" and, especially, "Late Night with Craig Ferguson."

"That's been the most fun of anything I've done," White says of her appearances with Scottish-born comedian Ferguson. "The one thing is, we can't ever make eye contact when we're together or we both crack up. We just tickle each other. I love him."

White also is getting set to embark on a brand new TV series. She'll be joining sitcom veterans Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick on "Hot in Cleveland," a comedy coming to TVLand. "The pilot got picked up so fast it blew our minds," says White, who starts working on the series the day after she returns to California from shooting "SNL" in New York.

The premise finds Bertinelli, Leeves and Malick renting a house together in Cleveland, where White's character has been a housekeeper for 50 years. "And they inherit me along with the house," says White. "And of course I'm a pain in the neck."

The theme of this weekend's "SNL" is Mother's Day and while White knew few details at the time of the network conference call last week, various moms are expected to be saluted. White singled out Dana Carvey's Church Lady as a sketch that always tickled her.

Asked if she was worried that the only man on the show might be special musical guest Jay-Z, White snapped right back to her man crazy Sue Ann character: "I hope not. But if there isn't, I'll hit on every member of the crew."