Andrew Borakove was a television comedy writer in Hollywood when he realized he had to make a life change.
"A vision of a gong appeared before me, and I said a gong? I've never thought of that," he says. "And I started doing research and I said, 'Yep, I could maybe sell gongs for a living.' "
So he moved with his wife and two children to Lincoln, Neb., and opened Gongs Unlimited, an online gong shop. That's where former host of weekends on All Things Considered Guy Raz and producer Brent Baughman found him earlier this year.
Borakove's doors have been open for eight years, somehow surviving the recession. "We've watched the world go up and down, but when you're selling gongs, there's no up or down, it's just round," he says. "We start from the center and radiate out."
Last time we spoke with him, he told us car dealerships were a flourishing customer of his — hitting the gong for every auto sale. We wanted to know, what's going on now?
"We just recently had a gong on [the Fox TV show] The Mindy Project," he says. "It was the centerpiece of a whole scene!"
But that's not all Borakove's been up to. In 2012, gongs went green. Borakove and the rest of his gong gang have been upcycling to make gong stands. "I took roll bars that were left over from some sort of manufacturing for Jeeps, and we made gong stands out of stuff that was going to be thrown away or scraped."
Borakove's message for 2013? "You know how the kids used to say 'peace out'? I'm saying peace in."
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.