Separated at Birth: Gov. Blagojevich and Adam Rich?

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We’ll let it slide that the hair is an unnatural color for a man of 52, and that he apparently refers to his favorite Paul Mitchell hairbrush as ‘the football.’ Something about Milorad ‘Rod’ Blagojevich and his bouncin’ and behavin’ head of hair has given us an odd feeling of deja vu. The sheer volume of it makes you look for the telltale chinstrap holding the helmet in place. Both are from my childhood.

There are only two places I’ve seen anything like it, and both are from 1977.

First is the Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Barber & Beauty Shop (which apparently lives on in an updated version as the Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Crazy Cuts playset), a toy that allowed you to clamp a mold over the bald head of a toy figurine and, by turning a crank, extrude Play-Doh into something approximating a mass of play clay hair as solid as the Illinois governor’s.

The other was atop the head of child star Adam Rich, who played Nicholas, the youngest of the Bradford brood raised by Dick Van Patten on the ABC series ‘Eight Is Enough’ from 1977 to 1981 (see Rich in the red shirt at bottom left).
Rich seemed to sport more hair on his tiny head than the rest of the cast combined, an outsized bowl of hair soup so dense it could quite possibly have hidden a ninth Bradford (or maybe Oliver from ‘The Brady Bunch’).

The resemblance is even more uncanny when Blagojevich starts his finger-biting and half-smirking, like a child star who knows all too well how to toy with the camera for maximum exposure.

The bad news is that, not unlike other former child stars, Rich has had his own run-ins with the law (in 1992 he was convicted of breaking into a West Hills pharmacy and of theft of a drug-filled syringe from a Marina del Rey hospital).

The good news? Sans the trademark coif Rich can walk around virtually incognito. Our suggestion? When all this blows over, Blago might want to seriously consider a back-to-basics buzz cut. By trimming his tonsorial trademark, he’d almost be able to hide in plain sight.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s been his plan all along.

I wonder if the authorities can get a restraining order against his barber?

-- Adam Tschorn

Photos (from top): Gov. Rod Blagojevich at a Dec. 19 news conference. Credit: Michael Tercha / Chicago Tribune.

Play-Doh’s Fuzzy Pumper Crazy Cuts. Credit: Hasbro

File photo of the cast of ABC’s ‘Eight Is Enough,’ circa 1977.