Office Party

“I sat and talked to him just like you and I are talking,” the Radisson’s longtime lobby pianist will tell me. “And he was a really nice guy. Normal.”

In Scranton right now, it’s the natives who have gone a little crazy.

When the interviews are over here at the hotel, Wilson is whisked away in a stretch Hummer limo about the size of a bus and transported all of eight blocks to the headquarters of the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce, where he’s guest of honor at a VIP brunch that the local weekly reports has “everyone and their temp … working themselves into a frenzy attempting to gain access.” Among the hundred or so lucky ones who get in is the Lackawanna County sheriff, who promptly swears Wilson in as a local law-enforcement official. Wilson accepts his new status as an official unofficial Scranton cop by handcuffing the mayor. The VIPs love a good bondage joke.

In the midst of all this, a couple whose first date was to watch The Office come to the front of the room and get engaged. Wilson offers to officiate at their wedding. He grabs the prospective bride and pretends to make out with her. He does the same with the groom. After antics like that, the actor has nowhere to go, really. Except to the Mall at Steamtown.

“We took him on a little tour of Scranton on the way over,” reports Scranton mayor Chris Doherty. “He got on his cell phone and called Greg Daniels” — who created The Office for NBC, adapting a 12-episode BBC show — “and I heard him tell Daniels, ‘This is a great town.’”

The big limo turns onto Lackawanna Avenue and approaches the Mall at Steamtown, which was built in 1993 for more than $100 million with the hope it would revive a moldering downtown in a city that even the Pittsburgh newspaper describes as “hardscrabble.”

“I told Rainn to stick his head out the window,” the mayor will later remember. “And when he saw all the people lined up to see him, he just said, ‘Holy crap!’”

Stretching from way down by the Bon-Ton department store, the line runs past the Ground Round and into the mall atrium, does a few loops, and winds up at what would normally be Santa’s perch. The local paper will estimate the queue to contain more than 1,000 people; the mall promoters will claim 4,000.

Rainn Wilson is amazed. “I’m a minor TV celebrity,” he’s told one Scrantonian. But not in this town. Wilson wades into the crowd and gasps, “I’m a rock star.”

He had no idea of the depth of Scranton’s hunger for celebrity, no matter how minor. This town two hours up the Turnpike from Philly has long had a self-­effacing, hangdog character, brought on by decades of economic stagnation. But now the big picture is looking good, young people are hanging around, and thanks in part to this unusual prime-time sitcom, Scranton — could it be?! — is suddenly kind of hip.

Through the afternoon, the actor graciously grips and grins, signs everything thrust at him, laughs when some women throw panties onstage. A mall hair salon is offering a Dwight Schrute styling for only $6. Business is brisk at the coffee shop, which has been mentioned on The Office. It has a name any comedy writer would love to invent — Jitterz.