The Warehouse Grill in Liberty Village fills up quickly at lunchtime, a long line of locals queuing, ordering and pressing money on the beleaguered guy at the cash. He still makes time, when I get to him, to nod discreetly toward a window-side table and say, “You know who she is? That’s Canada’s most famous opera singer.” The slim-ish young woman just settling in is Measha Brueggergosman (accompanied, as she very often is, by her starchily preoccupied, laptop-toting husband, Markus, also her full-time personal manager). She’s hard to miss, even in a crowd. A strikingly beautiful woman with an unapologetically blossoming ’fro, she favours jewellery at the nuclear end of dazzle (she has an exclusive arrangement with Yorkville sparklemeister Myles Mindham) and outfits that—let’s just say—are not exactly lunch­time standard at a neighbour­hood diner. She laughs big, and she laughs a lot. She laughs when she talks about a trip to Iceland, where she had a chance to taste putrefied shark fin (“just so I’ll never have to do it again”) and whale (“tastes just like steak”). She laughs when I tell her how the cashier described her, quips back with, “I may be the most famous, but I’m not the best…” Which leaves you with a lingering sense that the missing word is “yet.”

This has been Measha’s year. She was the cover girl on the January issue of Chatelaine (the first time the magazine has put a classical singer on the cover). She was the only classical performer to take the stage January 12 for the Oscar Peterson tribute at Roy Thomson Hall, personally invited by the Peterson family. On January 17, CBC Television featured her on the genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, tracing her family history back to Cameroon and the Bassa, a tribe known for its musical traditions. Opera Atelier, the city’s baroque theatre company, is trumpeting its casting coup in having engaged her to sing Elettra in its spring production of Mozart’s Idomeneo. She already has two albums on CBC Records, and last October she released her Deutsche Grammophon debut CD, Surprise, the first product of an exclusive contract with the classical world’s most prestigious label (the only other Canadian singer to sign exclusively with DG is tenor Ben Heppner, very much her senior both in age and performance history). Bill Palant, her agent and a vice-president with IMG Artists in New York, says another record company (he won’t divulge the name) was bidding for her at the same time, and “to have two simultaneous bids from two major companies is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

She is a television personality, and not just at the tony, high-art end of the medium: she has co-hosted Breakfast Television, and introduced pop bands, dancers, singers and comedians for the Sun TV series T.O. Variety Show. She was a judge on MuchMusic’s Video on Trial and has been a celebrity guest on The Surreal Gourmet and Bathroom Divas (reality TV for opera fans). She’s also been a judge on American Idol Underground, a Web-based competition seeking stars in genres other than pop. She has her own Web site, of course, as well as a MySpace page. A young admirer from Aylmer, Ontario, formed a fan group for her on Facebook, where the gushing approaches Tiger Beat proportions.

Even her feet and her hair are famous. Reviews rarely fail to mention that she sings barefoot when giving a recital, and National Post society columnist Shinan Govani gave her hair most of a paragraph in one of his vertiginous columns: “Her grand black diva mane is as much an instrument as her voice. And she let me in on a secret. It looks particularly good now because Measha stopped shampooing six months ago.”