After 25 years, patriotic grandmother realizes her Fourth of July shirt actually shows Panama's flag

Panama's flag.
(Image credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images)

For nearly three decades, a Houston grandmother has been accidentally repping Panama every Fourth of July.

Dale Cheesman and his sister's fiancé were looking over the World Cup schedule on Monday when they saw the Panamanian flag and realized something: It looked exactly like a red, white, and blue shirt Cheesman's 88-year-old grandmother, Shirley, wears on the Fourth of July, and it dawned on them that her patriotic top would be best suited for Panama's Independence Day. "We died laughing," Cheesman told BuzzFeed News. "We showed the family and they did as well."

Cheesman tweeted about the fashion faux pas, and his grandmother's "over 25 years of treason." Before you start calling her Benedict Shirley, know that she finds the whole thing "hilarious," her grandson said, and is going to keep wearing the shirt "because it's a tradition and now it's just a funnier tradition."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.