This Soprano Is a Real Girl Scout

She’s the diva of Girl Scout cookies.

Opera star Jessye Norman sold more than 2,000 boxes in the past year--”My best year ever,” she says.

“I get the chipmunk and the stuffed bear and the patch and everything--just like the 10-year-olds,” says the 54-year-old soprano about her sideline from “that night job,” her career as a concert artist.

“I will sell cookies to anybody, anywhere, on the street, to people out of the back of my car.” But unlike other cookie sellers, her car has a chauffeur and she’s an honorary lifetime Girl Scout attached to a troupe in Paris.

Nothing odd about that. After all, the Georgia-born singer first became a musical icon in France. Her following was so over-the-top that Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1982 film, “Diva,” starring Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, was based on one of Norman’s obsessive admirers, who planned his life around her concerts.

Now, her first solo recording in three years is of French music and--surprise!--it’s not classical.

“I Was Born in Love With You” is an album of cabaret songs by Grammy-winning songwriter Michel Legrand, to be released Feb. 8. It’s a sexy switch from the formidable operatic heroines that won Norman fame.

“I’m dying of love from beginning to end of the album, which is just fine,” says the newly minted chanteuse, releasing a peal of laughter that erupts like Niagara Falls.

On Valentine’s Day, she’s bringing the songs to Studio 54 here for a show benefiting God’s Love We Deliver, which delivers free meals to homebound people with AIDS. It’s one of dozens of charities to which she volunteers her time.

“The love of one’s community, and the love that we need to put into that to make it all a bit better, is something that I’d like us to focus on this first Valentine’s Day of the new century,” she said.

Offering love to strangers doesn’t quite fit Norman’s cliched public image--that of a bigger-than-life star, ready to dazzle. That’s who viewers saw on worldwide television in 1989, singing for the bicentennial of the French Revolution, standing by the Arc de Triomphe draped in the “tricolor” flag, and again in 1996 at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, and in 1997 for President Clinton’s inaugural.

Those were media spectacles that featured a public figure full of control and elegance in both dress and bearing, a woman whose voice was an opulent force of nature. But during a recent interview in a Manhattan hotel suite, a far more down-to-earth, even vulnerable, individual emerged.

“I wouldn’t like to completely disillusion people who think I wear a tiara all day,” Norman jokes. She sits quietly on a sofa, occasionally wringing her hands as she ponders aspects of her life.

“What is a diva, anyway?” she asks suddenly, backing the question with her disarming style--a simple black dress, short manicure and no eye-popping jewels.

She often putters around her suburban home in Westchester County in sweatshirts and baggy pants. “Sometimes I look down and say, ‘Did I get dressed today, or what?’ ”

And this is one star who doesn’t do her hair every day. “Oh no! You’d be shocked.”

In March, she’s up for a series of U.S. recitals starting at Carnegie Hall, where she is to premiere a piece by composer Judith Weir, with texts by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Clarissa Pinkola Estes. But whether in a concert hall or a cabaret, Norman can’t seem to get far from one thing: “I’m dying always!”

There’s another constant: “It’s the same vocal cords. The change takes place here,” she says, pointing to her head. “Singing happens very much in the mind, as well as in the rest of the body.”