Christopher Mark Pula

Doug Hughes remembers walking down Commercial Street in Provincetown past the house Chris shared with his partner Thom when that voice rang out from the open Dutch door.

“You look like Joan Crawford!”

Doug recalls what prompted Chris’s observation: He was wearing a hat with a wide brim. “Just hearing his voice would make you laugh,” Doug says.

Christopher M. Pula, 69 of Provincetown, MA passed away Sunday, December 29,2024.

Barbara Griffin, who was neighbors with Chris and Thom in New York City, recalls hearing him on the subway platform when they were waiting for a train.

“Come listen to a story about a man named Jed…”

Chris's delivery was lousy, Barbara remembers. It sounded like he was trying to rap. But she could still recognize the theme song from “The Beverly Hillbillies.” And she knew right then that everything was going to be fine with her life in a new city.

"In that moment, I knew two things: I’d just met someone remarkable, and somehow, moving to New York was going to be okay,” Barbara says.

Chris left his family and friends with a lot of memories after he passed away. Few were as indelible as his voice.

That voice. It could sound like a honk, a bark, a foghorn. When you heard it, he was probably catcalling you or heckling you.

“Crunchy. Raspy,” is how Terry Keane, a friend of 20 years from Provincetown, recalls it. “He was iconic. Absolutey iconic,” Terry says.

Thom, Chris’s parther, can still hear how Chris called out to him by his full name — “Thom Biggert!” he would bellow — even though they were together for nearly 50 years.

“With Chris, the formal became the endearing,” Thom says.

Many friends have their own impression. They can imitate how he sounded calling one of his and Thom’s Jack Russell Terriers. “Chuck!” Or some of the one-liners he’d lob at the tourists who were always ambling into his lawn to take pictures of the harbor. "If you're going to walk in my yard, the least you can do is pick me some flowers.”

What isn’t as easy to emulate about Chris is the generosity he showed. That was inimitable.

“He had a way of communicating that had its own texture,” says Gail Strickland, another friend of many years from Provincetown. She calls that his “Chris-ness."

Gail, who has a condition that makes her voice sometimes difficult to hear, recalls how Chris was always telling her to speak up. “He’d go, ’Say it louder!” Gail says.

But she knew he wasn’t making fun of her, even though it could have seemed that way to a stranger. Chris was in fact letting everyone know that Gail deserved to be heard.

“He insisted that I be understood. And he wanted me to know he insisted,” Gail remembers.

Chris was a such a voracious consumer of news. He read the New York Times and watched MSNBC every day.

"He would never cut me a break says a NYT journalist with whom Chris became friends.

I'd go a week or two without a story in the Times or an appearance on MSNBC, and my phone would start buzzing with nosy messages from him. "Where have you been?" "Did you get fired?"

He was like my mother with all the comments on my work. Though my mother has a much less vivid imagination used fewer curse words.

In the time he wasn’t spending becoming one of Provincetown’s most informed citizens, he worked at the local soup kitchen. He liked to throw the tennis ball to his dogs. He and Thom enjoyed many an early dinner at George’s, just a short walk away from their home.

For someone who was incredibly successful as one of Hollywood’s most talented marketing minds, he was intolerably cheap.

He drank Natty Light beer. He always wore the same pair of cargo shorts. His nephew Travis Frey remembers how much Chris liked White Castle burgers.

Pratt Cassity, a friend for almost 50 years, recalls how they started sharing a low-budget Thanksgiving early on in their friendship. “It was highlighted by his turkey and dressing made with Cheerios, eaten on a redwood picnic table in his dining room with a cartoon plastic tablecloth,” Pratt says.

They shared almost daily phone calls. Before text messages existed, Chris and Pratt would mail each other packets of news clippings with wild and peculiar stories.

“What a major shift in the earth's axis when Chris learned to send messages on smartphones,” Pratt says.

Jerry Homan, another friend of Chris and Thom’s from their days in New York, says Chris was “an easy friend to talk to.” He was also “funny, frustrating, complicated, genuine, and talented."

Jerry always marveled at Chris’s ease with strangers and how he would stand in the Dutch door of the house and call out to the tourists who passed by on trolleys. “Astonishment, with a little admiration,” Jerry says.

If Chris wasn’t in the doorway, his famous sock puppet adorned with Mardi Gras beads was. It was like an unofficial town mascot.

The tourists who visit now will still get a glimpse of the sock puppet on their trolley rides. The main attraction at 473 Commercial won’t be there. But he will still be watching, thinking of something irreverent and witty to call out — this time from above.

Chris is survived by his husband, Thomas Biggert, Anne Marie Pula-Campbell (Matt), John Pula (Pam), Barbara Ostrosky(Nick) and many more family and cherished friends.

He was preceded in death by his mother Pat, father Art and brother Greg Pula.